That Aldó and Klára can talk to each other about such things, while showing a respectful attitude toward their individual emotional architecture - his paternally compassionate touch, her request for comforting hugs - suggests an open door to healing neither wants to shut and which convinces Olgi to accept a co-guardianship with this cheerless but kind doctor. Underneath her mask of old-soul scorn and his hollowed-out professionalism, they feel left behind, without a clear path forward. When he meets angrily self-possessed 16-year-old patient Klára (Abigél Szőke), she’s coming out of a delayed puberty, still writing letters to parents whose absence she can explain away, and railing against life under her discipline-intensive, exasperated great-aunt Olgi (Mari Nagy).īut it’s already a sign of the sensitive hands we’re in - from the actors, the director and the editor - that when these generation-apart opposites lock eyes in the sterile atmosphere of an examination room, we know what’s passing between them isn’t some illicit spark, but the recognition of what binds them: presenting a brave front to an unjust world. A solemn male doctor and an impetuous teenage girl find a hopeful bond, and a way back from loss, in the patient, tender Hungarian period drama “Those Who Remained.” Gently pitched to hold equal levels of hurt and promise, even as it deftly addresses the optics that are hard to ignore, Barnabás Tóth’s richly acted film exudes a faith in human connection as relevant today as such relationships needed to be in the years after World War II for survivors of unimaginable trauma.Īldó, played by Károly Hajduk, is a wiry, disheveled figure with benevolent eyes and a haunted air, whose entire life is his ob-gyn practice since losing his family in the camps.
0 kommentar(er)
