This is as good as mid-century poetic melodramas get. A Hungarian film by István Szőts, shot on location (!) in the Transylvanian Alps bordering the Carpathians, "People of the Mountains" is a remarkable historical document, but more importantly, a truly hidden gem of world cinema.
This grim yet breathtakingly beautiful film follows the tragic fate of an illiterate young mountain family and their pre-modern community as they are confronted with the oncoming Capitalist modernity. Though a seemingly predictable motif, for viewers nurtured in Hollywood social and historical melodrama, this film is anything but. In the course of the film, we encounter many remarkable scenes with characters responding to situations in the most surprising manner and in a way no Hollywood character would.
Shot in 1942 in the then Hungarian controlled Transylvania, a territory they received from Romania thanks to the brokering by Nazi-Germany, "People of the Mountains" allows both fascist and socialist readings. It is about an anti-Capitalist social struggle, but it is also an ode to the return to ancient harmony and circularity of time. Yet, the film also resists and defies both ideologies: socialism, with the film's deep and intimate religiosity, its utter disinterest in Marxist progress-cult; fascism, with the film's sympathy toward a small non-national community and its manifest anti- authority and anti-state message. At its core, "People of the Mountains" is a Christian (though paganism-infused) humanist film with a strong anarchist undercurrent. With its motifs of civilizational clash and respect for cultural uniqueness, one is reminded of films by Peter Weir, Sergei Parajanov and Werner Herzog.
Surely, the film is nostalgic, sentimental and emotively driven, but not in a cheap of schematic manner. I assure you, it will make you cry (and also laugh occasionally).
I am not exaggerating by saying that this film should belong to the canon of world classics. And it does not require banal legitimization narratives about how Goebbels hated it and how it functioned as some sort of "resistance" film. This is a film that is worth seeing on its own merits, for its ideas and values that are today largely forgotten since they don't fit with simple mainstream ideological programs of the 20th century. I would recommend "People of the Mountains" to anyone interested in seeing how remarkably differently and unpredictably a mid-century social melodrama about a disappearing community could be made. "How Green was My Valley" has nothing on this.
