Another Way

Aside from its fine acting and its tense, noir-ish plot, Károly Makk’s Another Way (Egymásra nézve, 1982) is notable for its daring subject matter. The film, based on a novella by Erzébet Galgóczi, depicts a doomed lesbian love affair that takes place in late 1950s Hungary, shortly after the country’s failed 1956 uprising against Communism. The topic was a double taboo: Another Way was the first Hungarian feature film with homosexuality as a central theme and, slightly more common but certainly no less shocking at the time, the film looked back at 1956’s upheavals and the consequences of them.

The authorities balked when they first saw Makk’s film. Although overt censorship was rare in Communist Hungary (in contrast to Czechoslovakia or Poland), Makk was put under pressure to make changes to the film. However, the Cannes selection committee started to take an interest in Another Way, presumably based on Makk’s previous international successes, including two awards and a special mention for another of his masterpieces, Love (Szerelem, 1971). Despite official protestations and offers from the state-owned distributors of other new Hungarian films to show instead, Makk’s new feature was screened uncut at the 1982 Cannes festival and was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize and the Prize for Best Peformance by an Actress for Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak.

Although the political sensitivities have long since faded, the film’s entwining of political and sexual identity still remains bold. It is also worth noting, that despite the considerably greater degree of political expression Makk has had since the fall of Communism, films such as his Hungarian Requiem (Magyar Rekviem, 1992), which also concerns the fateful year of 1956 as viewed from a few years after, have been widely regarded as far weaker works aesthetically and politically than Love or Another Way.

Love Beyond the Boundaries

When Éva (Jankowska-Cieslak) starts her new job as a journalist (at a periodical ironically named The Truth), she meets Livia (Grazyna Szapolowska), who soon finds it difficult to keep her eyes off her forthright young colleague. Following a swimming trip together, Livia challenges Éva as to why she has stolen her knickers. Éva's mumbled and stuttered response about "certain feelings" sets off a mixture of emotions in the older woman. While Éva has become besotted, Livia, given that she is married, is rather more cautious. She backs out of a trip to a collective farm to investigate corruption, in order to avoid Éva, but then at the last minute changes her mind and seems to have reconciled herself to her new-found love. The collective throws a party to which the journalists are invited and Livia steers clear of Éva; instead, she dances flirtatiously with the men of the farm. Éva stays sober and watches Livia from a distance, whilst at the same time using the occasion to speak to the farm managers, who with their tongues loosened a little by alcohol divulge the murky truth behind the collective's formation.

As headstrong in her writing as she is in love, Éva writes an uncompromising report of the state brutality used to force the farmers to found the collective. The piece is too radical even for her supportive editor, and he makes changes. Éva resigns in protest, something which doesn't stop her from being fired.

After more vacillating, Livia meets Éva again. The two women make love for the first time, and Livia decides to leave her husband, Dönci (Péter Andorai), an amiable army officer. Defying his outward persona of gentleness, Dönci becomes violent and shoots Livia. Dönci is imprisoned, and Livia is hospitalised. Even though she has lost her husband, Livia now changes her mind again and rejects Éva, who commits a passive form of suicide by refusing to stop when challenged by border guards, knowing full well she will be shot. Her demise – preceded by a shot of an owl, a symbol of death in Hungary –hauntingly frames the film, making up both its first and last scenes (a structural device also used by the book). Only the image of a second bird of prey flying away offers some image of hope.

Of Closets and Corridors

Éva’s demise is foreshadowed throughout the film by her marginalisation; with her boyish looks and diminutive figure, she is frequently relegated to the edge of the screen, such as at the farm celebration when Livia desperately tries to convince everyone, especially herself, that she is heterosexual. If the camera lingers longer on Livia, it is because she embodies the central dilemma of the film for Makk. Livia is weak and vulnerable, torn between her desire for illicit love and for a “normal” family life as a mother, and she has none of the headstrong confidence of Éva. In Éva’s double rejection, in work and in love, the film sees the political and sexual status quo preserved.

Makk clearly links the two elements of Éva’s downfall, and, as scholar Kevin Moss has pointed out, the characters use the same kind of lexical and grammatical evasions (particularly use of empty pronouns – “I’ve never done something like this”) to discuss lesbianism that dissident literature uses to underline forbidden political points of view, while the corridor at the offices of The Truth are treated as a political analogue to sexuality’s closet: the only place where openness is allowed.

In his perceptive and thoughtful volume World Cinema: Hungary, Bryan Burns offers a detailed literary analysis of Another Way. Although Burns makes some uncharacteristically off-mark criticisms of the film, he comments that Another Way is more notable for having used lesbianism as a theme than it is for the way in which the theme has been treated. This observation has some substance to it. Makk is clearly not interested in gay rights in 1950s Hungary per se, and it is doubtful in the extreme that he considered that the film might reach a gay audience. Instead, Livia’s dilemma for Makk is a metaphor for the vulnerability of human identity in restrictive external circumstances. Indeed, Burns quotes Makk as saying that his aim in the film is to find “universal significance”.

Nevertheless, Makk’s portrayal of homosexuality is neither sensationalist nor exploitative, and (as even the sceptical Burns notes) the subject is portrayed with conviction, with Makk’s condemnation of social repression of sexuality being equal to that directed at state oppression of dissidence. Given the relatively low level of positive portrayals of gay themes in early 1980s feature films (never mind in the more restrictive circles of Central and East European cinema), Makk’s film remains as commendable for its sensitive portrayal of lesbian love as it is for being a masterful study of the intrusion of social and political mores into individual identity.

-- Andrew James Horton

This essay is a revised version of one originally published in Central Europe Review.

Further Reading:
-Bryan Burns, World Cinema: Hungary (Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 1996)
-Kevin Moss, “The Underground Closet: Sexual and Political Dissidence in East European Culture,” in Ellen E. Berry, ed., Genders 22: Post-Communism and the Body Politic (1995), 229-251, reprinted online: http://community.middlebury.edu/~moss/PDFs/Genders.pdf


Contents
Essay

An essay on the film by Andrew James Horton

Film Reviews

New York Times Review
Review from Popcorn Q
Time Out Film Guide

DVD Reviews

DVDBeaver
DVD Times

Connections

Hungarian film site

Awards

1982 Cannes Film Festival
Best Actress - Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak
FIPRESCI Prize – Károly Makk
Nominated Golden Palm
1983 Sao Paulo Film Festival
Best Feature Film


Disc Info

Another Way Boxshot

Hungary 1982
103 minutes
Certificate: 18
Colour 1.66:1 16x9 Enhanced
Language: Hungarian
Subtitles: English
PAL R0
RRP: £12.99
Release Date: 3rd October 2005

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Karoly Makk’s acclaimed 1971 film Love (Szerelem) is also available on Second Run DVD

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