A 10-year-old Hungarian boy and his grandmother cope with the bloody Budapest uprising of 1956 that led to the Soviet takeover of the country. When the October battles begin, the boy and his family are forced to remain in their homes. The grandmother spends her days reading, and the boy is thrilled to be out of school. While they await the end of the curfew, many things befall the lad and his family.
Péter Gárdos offers a warm, loveable tragicomedy about a household’s reaction to a traumatic world. In this child’s-eye-view of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, there is gunfire in the streets, school is closed, and life for the children is a holiday. Rarely leaving their apartment, the adults are terrified, except Grandma, who returns from shopping with bullet-ridden bread. The homely father thinks he’s another Fred Astaire and secretly wishes to pursue a career in America; the mother worries about her lover; Grandma is militant; ten-year-old Tomi is obsessed with sex; and little Anamari shouts politically dangerous slogans out the window. Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1987 Montréal World Film Festival, WHOOPING COUGH is a “revelation”.
Tomi and Annamari are delighted when their parents tell them that they don’t have to go to school. Father returns home and proudly announces that he’s slapped the insufferable Party prig who tormented him at work. Grandma comes home from shopping, and discovers that there are two bullet holes in the loaf of bread she’s been carrying. Yes, it’s 1956 and the uprising has broken out in Budapest and all over Hungary, and suddenly it’s every man and women for themselves. Winner of the top prize at the Chicago Flm Festival as well as a host of other international awards, Péter Gárdos’s Whooping Cough takes a decidedly less reverential tone to its depiction of the events of ’56, offering a wry, black-humored look as what happens to one family when suddenly from one day to the next his world is turned upside down.
评论(0)