![]() When Gloomy Sunday (Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod) begins, a German enters a restaurant in Budapest with his wife of fifty years, orders rouladen, admires a photograph of a woman on display, and dies when a certain song is played. Why does he go to that restaurant? Who is the woman? Why does he die when the song is played? To answer the mystery, the scene flashes back to a time just before World War II. One of the two finest restaurants in Budapest is run by László Szabó (played by Joachim Król) with the charming assistance of his beautiful mistress Ilona Varnai (played by Erika Maroszán). Since American tourists expect restaurants to have music, Szabó retains the services of a pianist. When his pianist dies, he seeks a replacement, various pianists audition, and he hires an older man who plays sweetly. However, András Aradi (played by Stefano Dionisi) arrives an hour late for the audition, after the replacement has been hired. Ilona notices something fascinating about the handsome latecomer and prevails upon her husband to hear him play; when he plays in a manner deserving of applause, they agree to hire him instead. Soon, it is Ilona’s birthday. Various gifts are presented, but Aradi’s gift is a song that he composed for her, entitled “Gloomy Sunday,” which is so impressive that Aradi ultimately receives a recording contract from a Viennese music publisher. However, there is a suicide the first time he plays the song, and several others commit suicide after hearing the song. Of course, the events of the Nazi rise to power in Central Europe might easily have occasioned suicide, but the press prefers to publicize the curse of the song, which was actually composed in 1933 and was even banned by BBC because of the supposed curse. One of the regular patrons at the restaurant is Hans Wieck (played by Ben Becker), who is enamored not only of the song and the rouladen but also of Ilona, to whom he proposes on his last night in town. When she declines, he jumps into the Danube but is rescued by Szabó while she is beginning a love affair at Aradi’s apartment. Wieck, nevertheless, returns to Berlin and marries; but during the war he goes back to Budapest as a colonel in the SS. In time, he arranges to save some 1,000 Jews from the concentration camps, but he accumulates Swiss francs and American dollars for the privilege, hoping after Germany’s ultimate defeat to emerge as a rich man. Szabó is Jewish, but Wieck promises to protect him from the Final Solution, thus repaying him for saving his life from the waters of the Danube, while retaining his lust for Ilona. The Nazi presence, in any case, is hardly benign for Hungary or for the prominent characters in the film. In a flashforward, filmviewers realize that the man who enters the restaurant at the beginning of the movie is indeed Wieck. Whereas the epilog of the story focuses on elderly Ilona and Szabó, the haunting song plays over and over again in the credits, including that of director Rolf Schübel, who bases the somewhat old-fashioned story on the novel by Nick Barkow. However, there was indeed a Nazi named Kurt Becher who saved a number of Jews from the gas chambers, so the German film serves as a biopic of sorts, not unlike Schindler’s List (1993). MH |