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LOST ILLUSIONS (ELVESZETT ILLÜZIöK)



For those of you who live in the Rochester, NY area, the following movie
(which I have never heard of, before seeing it on their web site) is being
shown at the George Eastman House on December 11 at 8 p.m. as part of their
CINEMA HUNGARY series

LOST ILLUSIONS (ELVESZETT ILLÜZIöK), Gyula Gazdag, 1982, 106 min., Hungarian
with English subtitles. Notorious in Hungary for his subversive
documentaries, Gazdag here creates a sardonic "operetta" with incidental
music by The Who. An update of the second part of the famous Balzac novel
transposed to Budapest in the summer of 1968, Lost Illusions is the
seriocomic story of an ambitious young writer from the provinces trying to
make a career in the capital. The film's satire derives from its
entanglement of literary pretension, politics, and sexual liaisons. Part of
the joke is that in Budapest or Paris, in 1868 or 1968, things are pretty
much the same on all fronts: the hero must lose his illusions.