Glamour

Unfortunately, this film is neither a "jewish" film or a film about Jews. If this is indeed autobiographical, then the filmmaker, whose parents he is attempting to portray, displays a disturbing ignorance either about Hungarian Jews, the historical period through which they passed, and/or the history of Hungarian Jews themselves. One is left with the suspicion that his parents "saved" themselves by disavowing any connection with their Jewishness and marrying, via the church, even though he was a Jew and she an aryan from the third Reich. Nazi's, extermination, the brutality of the red regime, all of that, is tossed aside. What we do see, instead, is a portrait of a rather conventional and dislikeable ghetto Jew (the grandfather) accompanied by the filmmaker's version of "jewish" music, not unlike the kind of faux Chinese music that used to accompany Charlie Chan. The highly stylized central European poetic style merely served to disguise or obscure the actual facts were concerning his family's development. Yes, the photography was lush; but the script itself was ludicrous.