My Way Home

This early (pre-Round-Up) Jancsó movie is apparently autobiographical in spirit if not in letter. Its young Hungarian protagonist wanders through the Russian-occupied Hungary of the final months of WWII, suffering a pointedly arbitrary round of arrests, internments and accusations. In a way that foreshadows Jancsó's later choreographic effects, he is sometimes the focus of our attention, and sometimes lost in larger patterns of landscape and movement. The film's centrepiece is its study of the one period when he comes to rest: he is assigned to help a wounded Russian soldier tend a herd of cows. Jancsó's portrait of the warm, doomed relationship between the two men is one of the most moving and clear-sighted analyses of male sensibilities and friendship in all cinema.