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MovieMail's Review
My Way Home is set in Hungary in 1945, in the final days of WWII. The Red Army is advancing and the German army retreating across the country, which is crowded with a confusion of human traffic heading west. In this situation, a 17 year-old Hungarian boy is captured and imprisoned at a remote barracks. Released in error, he is arrested again and strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young Russian soldier whose charge he is put into as they tend the cows for his unit's milk supply. His attempts to return home then form the crux of this wonderfully lyrical film, which displays all of Jancsó's consistent themes: the psychological presence of landscape, the randomness of violence and the arbitrary nature of power.
Jancsó said that My Way Home was 'autobiographical in feeling, if not in fact', and it is this sense of remembered life that gives his film a uniquely poetic, dreamlike quality in which people appear and disappear on the endless Hungarian plains and the boys work, eat and play together as the war encroaches on their mutual under-standing. It is their relationship that is at
the heart of the film. Though it is wordless, (they share no common spoken language), it was described in Time Out as 'one of the most moving and clear-sighted analyses of male sensibilities and friendship in all cinema'.
Jancsó fashioned a highly individual cinema within the confines of a state operated film industry, and with My Way Home we see him discovering his unique visual style, with his lengthy, elegant and supremely choreographed takes through which human life ebbs and flows. It was to reach mastery the following year with The Round-Up (an eagerly awaited DVD release
coming in the next few months from Second Run) and The Red and the White
(1967).
One of the world's most acclaimed directors, Miklós Jancsó, now in his eighties, is still working in Hungary, his career having undergone a recent resurgence in popularity. However, it is with My Way Home that he first revealed what an enormous talent he had, consistently marrying themes and
style in films of astonishing virtuosity.
Message of Stones - Máramaros: The second film in Miklós Jancsó's renowned but rarely-seen documentary series Message of Stones
New digital transfer with restored image and sound
New and improved English subtitle translation
Booklet featuring a reprint of Penelope Houston's seminal 1969 Sight & Sound article on Miklós Jancsó.
Film Description
In the final days of WWII, a seventeen-year-old boy is captured and imprisoned at a remote barracks, where he strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young Russian soldier. His attempts to return home form the crux of this wonderfully lyrical film, which displays all of Jancsó's consistent themes: the psychological presence of landscape, the randomness of violence and the arbitrary nature of power.
