Gábor Bódy

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Narcisus and Psyche is based on a novel by Sandor Weores which was adapted by Vilmos Csaplar and director Gabor Body for a feature-length, 261-minute film. Borrowing the character of Psyche from mythology and placing her in Europe in the 19th century, the authors give her a “modern” life. She is an attractive young woman – and remains so throughout the film, in spite of one hardship after another. Psyche is libidinous, and her prurient interests shock her staid contemporaries. For reasons that the viewer is left to ponder, her life is almost a living punishment for her sexual laxity. Her child is taken away and killed, and although she is in love with her tutor, who has syphilis, she marries another man. She is suffering herself from some affliction, which leads to hospital scenes that are acerbic commentaries on 19th c. Western medicine. Psyche is about to leave for America with her husband, when the story takes another abrupt turn.Read More »

The experimental film takes place in North-Caroline. In the last days of the American civil war three characteristic figures of the 1849 Hungarian emigration fight: the geographer artillery officer Fiala János, the rational scientist, Vereczky Ádám, the heroic fatalist and the attendant of Fiala: the emotional Boldogh, who struggles with homesickness. The fate of all the “”slowed down”” revolutionaries is hopeless. The boasting Vereczky dies a meaningless death on a huge swing which he was able to survey with the theodolite. Boldogh longs for home, maybe to die, while there is only one possibility for Fiala: he can participate in the construction works of the Pacific railway.Read More »

In a story that hops around a little, a priest arrives in a village to go from person to person offering his own form of consolation or advice. On his list of “clients” is a former Communist Party official who is now wheelchair-bound because of a sniper’s bullet during the 1956 uprising; a woman dying of tuberculosis; an astronomer who sings with a punk rock group; a woman who leaves her soldier-husband to work in a nightclub; and their son. As these people suffer through personal travails, a surprise is in store for everyone — the priest is not exactly who he seems to be.Read More »