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The Good Soldier

A real estate henchman falls for the very same woman he is supposed to evict.

synopsis

Mihály is a 35-year-old man. As a child, he was taken from an orphanage by Mrs. Vértes. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Mrs. Vértes took advantage of the new business opportunities to start a real estate company, clearing out old Budapest buildings of their tenants and handing the empty sites over for demolition. Mihály is her faithful henchman: blindly carrying out her orders like a good soldier, his job is to negotiate with the tenants, and if they resist, to evict them. Moving from one abandoned apartment building to the next, he has no permanent home, and no partner. One day, Mihály is given a new “assignment”: to evict Anna, a widowed music teacher who stubbornly refuses to move out. When her six-year-old son Dani discovers a striking resemblance between Mihály and his own late father, Mihály makes the life-altering decision to turn against Mrs. Vértes and help them stay. Mihály discovers for the first time what it means to have a home and a family. But to this emotionally stunted young man, it can be far more frightening than to confront the woman he calls “Mother” in an outburst of all-consuming irrational violence…

Director’statement

Starting from a western premise (a family desperately trying to defend its land) and its archetypical characters (the loner, the powerful landlord, the widow and the orphan), The Good Soldier slowly turns into an intimate kammerspiel set in present-day Budapest where four emotionally constrained individuals struggle for their independence. As Mihály breaks free from his domineering mother figure Vértes, he is taken in a journey of self-discovery where the true nature of his motivations is slowly revealed: what he is really after is fighting his ill-hearted dependence towards Vértes rather than creating a family of his own. Mihály becomes a western anti-hero: he is incapable of sacrificing for others, because he has nothing to give, he can only fight for himself. Inevitably, the story comes full circle and ends with the essential element of the western genre: the shootout. For it is only through violence that Mihály will achieve a darker glory and accept his intrinsic inability to love.

TFL PROGRAMME:
ScriptLab 2013
Discover more details here:
Download
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TFL Catalogue 2013

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