Innocent Radical

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

ANGIVERA

Directed and Written by Pal Gabor

Angi Vera is a film of paradoxes. The setting--at least for Americans--is at once exotic and dismal. The heroine, Angi Vera, is a fierce mouse. The style is gentle, almost pensive, yet the tale told is near savage in its implications.

The place is Hungary in 1948, during the Communist takeover. Angi Vera (her surname is placed first, according to the custom of the country), a nurse's aide, publicly denounces inhumane and corrupt treatment--bourgeois backsliding, as it were--in the hospital where she works.

Her reward is a scholarship to an adult-education institution where the Communists offer ideological instruction to workers who have the potential to become party functionaries. She is such a sweet, shy thing, and the school is so cold and so crowded with dominating personalities, that one thinks for a time that the film will be about how a waif's spirit was crushed. This plot line seems to be especially possible when she develops an infatuation for her principal instructor, who is married.

But that is not the way it works out. She turns out to be more grateful and more malleable than she is able to show. At one of those horrendous self-criticism sessions that were a feature of institutional life under Stalinism, little Angi Vera rises to denounce herself for her romantic weakness, which has the effect--another paradox here--of ending her lover's party career and enhancing her own. The film is written and directed with a kind of deadpan subtlety (perhaps the only way it could be done in a country that is, after all, Communist). It is impossible to say if careerist calculation enters into this act of betrayal. Mostly it seems to be the result of the girl's radical innocence. One feels, leaving the theater, that she is still alive and well in Hungary, still rising in the ranks, still grateful, and therefore still blindly loyal to whatever imperatives, however inhumane, the party may impose on her.

That Angi Vera lingers so in one's mind is a tribute to the winsome playing of Veronika Papp in the title role. She retains one's sympathy even when she is at her most enigmatic, even when, finally, she appalls. But the highest praise must go to Writer-Director Gabor. His wonderfully searching eye brings alive all sorts of difficult scenes--awful school social events, boring classroom discussions, dormitory gossip sessions--grants them a waywardness and a resonance that are rare. The deft economy with which he characterizes his heroine's classmates, preventing them from being mere types, is admirable. Strange and distant though his milieu is, it makes a rewarding and instructive place to visit.

--Richard Schickel

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.