A true story based on the life story of writer/director Eva Gardos, this film depicts the personal odyssey of a family's escape from Communist Hungary. One night, Margaret (Nastassja Kinski) and Peter (Tony Goldwyn) arrange to escape Hungary with their eldest daughter in tow, forcing them to leave behind their youngest, Suzanne, in the care of Margaret's mother. When the mother is separated from the young child, she goes to live in a peaceful Eastern European countryside with a loving man and
woman who raise her until age six, where Suzanne is sent for by her birth parents, now living in America. She finds the adjustment difficult and does not fully comprehend that Margaret and Peter are her parents, but she is willing to stay, and if she feels the same way in several years, Peter has agreed to give her a ticket back to Hungary. Later, as a rebellious teenager (played by Scarlett Johansson), with Margaret becoming a highly overprotective mother, she takes her father up on his offer to go back and reconnect with those who raised her as a child. While in Hungary, she has a change of heart , however, and discovers her true identity. The feature also co-stars Mae Whitman, Emmy Rossum, and Larisa Oleynik. ~ Jason Clark, Rovi
In spite of the movie's inflated title, writer/director Eva Gardos tells an emotionally charged story of Hungarian immigration that is touching and historically accurate.
The States becomes an apple-pie wonderland of Elvis and Coca-Cola, the old country either a gray police state or, in scenes of Suzanne's happy childhood, a pastoral haven.
Begins with harrowing detail but develops gaping holes as a decade and a half of potentially volcanic events and relationships is molded into a 106-minute movie.
This movie is really good. It's about a wealthy family that ran to america due to a cold war. They go to america to live the american dream, except that they have to leave thier youngest daughter behind due to her being a baby. Years later they get her back and go through problems like all families do.
September 28, 2008
Jeannette Garcia
One of the opening scenes of this film, where Soviet soldiers harass a young Hungarian woman in a restaurant and shoot her father for an attempt to protect her, is totally false. It has probably been made that way for a benefit of an average American moviegoer, who would easily understand a bar brawl scene, but set in
Eastern Europe few years after the Second World War ended ... One has to understand the restrictions the occupying Soviet Army's solders were under: Were they allowed to go to a restaurant? (No, they weren't.) Would they have money to pay even if they were able to go? (Same answer.) Would they have loaded weapons on them to shoot anyone there? (Absolutely not.) The whole episode (spell it c-l-i-c-h-é) belongs to a bad Western movie.
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