Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE NOTEBOOK”  My rating: B (Opening Oct. 10 at the Glenwood at Red Bridge)

112 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The varied parts of “The Notebook” don’t add up, but even taken individually some of those parts are amazing.

This Hungarian release from director Janos Szasz (it has absolutely nothing in common with the 2004 Ryan Gosling/Rachel McAdams weeper based on the Nicholas Sparks novel) falls into the children-warped-by-war genre. It is cousin to classics like the French “Forbidden Games” (1952) and the Soviet “Come and See” (1985).

The twist here is that instead of a single young protagonist through whom we experience war’s devastating effects, we are given a pair of identical twins, two young Hungarian boys who in the waning days of World War II are sent to live in the relative safety of the countryside.

In the opening moments we meet the unnamed youngsters (played by twins Laszlo Gyemant and Andras Gyemant) in their parents’ plush Budapest apartment.  Mother (Gyongyver Bognar) is beautiful and sophisticated and dotes terribly on her two little angels.  The father (Ulrich Matthes) is an officer whose access to military intelligence has convinced him that the Nazis with whom he has been collaborating for several years are on their way to defeat. When that happens he’ll be a marked man, as will his children.

Before sending his sons away, Father instructs them to keep a notebook of everything they encounter so that, when the family is finally reunited, he can see how they have educated themselves.

Mother takes the boys on a train ride to the sticks, where she deposits them at the farmhouse door of her mother (Piroska Molnar), a fat, bellicose, thoroughly unlikeable woman so antisocial she’s rumored to be a witch. We see no sign of occult activitiy, but just in her everyday life Grandmother is hell on wheels. She’s bitter have not having seen her daughter for years and contemptuously refers to the twins as “the bastards.”  She’s prepared to make them earn their keep by toiling around the farm. She parcels out food like it was gold. At night in the privacy of her room she obsesses over her small collection of jewelry and other valuables.

Pirolska Molnar as the Grandmother

“The Notebook” follows the fairly rapid de-civilizing of the boys. At first they’re like Tom and Huck, playing pranks and cavorting in the woods. Later they will have encounters with a hare-lipped girl (Orsolya Toth) who becomes their accomplice in thievery.  They blackmail the local deacon over his secret sexual behavior, befriend a Jewish merchant, and become the objects of obsession of a pretty but morally reprehensible maid (Diana Kiss).

The handsome, moody youngsters have another admirer, a Nazi officer (Ulrich Matthes) who is billeted in one of Grandmother’s outbuildings and casts an appreciatively lustful eye on his young neighbors.

Through all this the boys dutifully keep their notebook, writing daily entries and stuffing it with newspaper clippings (sometimes altered so that the marching Germans in photos now have skulls instead of human faces). And all the while they are slipping ever closer to completely feral behavior and even to murder.

The way in which the brothers Gyemant portray the twins is absolutely haunting. No one can tell which is which (that includes the audience) and that question soon becomes irrelevant. They are essentially one mind in two bodies. They communicate with a minimum of words. They stare at the world around them with the same impassive blankness (or so it seems until they do something that screams of calculated revenge).

At the same time, they are still children who need emotional support. Over time they actually become fond of their horrible Grandmother because, well, because she’s as close to a parental figure as they’ve got.

By the time the Nazis flee and the conquering Soviets show up, our two young protagonists will have developed utterly amoral survival skills.

The film’s main drawback (Szasz and Andras Szeker adapted Agota Kristof’s novel for the screen) is that its central motif — the notebook being kept by the boys — carries no dramatic or emotional weight. It provides a few narrative digressions, but never delivers a payoff. The film would be better off with a new title and no reference to this unremarkable journal.

| Robert W. Butler