Dear Betrayed Friends Directed by Sára Cserhalmi - Hungary, Germany, 2012 - East of the West

In Sára Cserhalmi’s feature debut, time does not heal; instead it waits patiently for the opportunity to turn old friends into enemies. When Andor gets to see his file and discovers that Janos was one of the informers, he is set to get his revenge against his friend, a gifted writer, but a terrible failure in his social life.

With impressive strength for a young female director, Cserhalmi takes us into a tense story that delves into the present under the strong influence of the past. In order to have access to the archives, Andor has to offer information on the period in which he suspects he was surveilled. A simple enumeration of the professions he had held durring this time (ranging from street sweeper to writer and teacher) is a skilfully chosen situation that tells a great deal about how intellectuals were repressed by the former regime. Moments like these are the film’s strong points: mundane events and discussions manage to express, in a nutshell, both the past and the present. Nevertheless, certain parts of the story are tangled in loose ends: it’s never very clear why and how Andor and Janos were close in the past or why they drifted apart.

With a great deal of subtlety, the director puts the two men into focus alternatively and manages to bring across that a strict good/bad dichotomy is not applicable to such a complex situation. The tension between Andor and Janos is constantly piled up as they interact every way but face to face. When the imminent encounter does take place, there is really nothing more to be said. But the way things develop, had this occured earlier, the situation wouldn’t have been a lot different. While Andor might lack the courage, Janos lacks the will. As he puts it himself, his exposure as an informat is more of a relief than a burden. The expectation of an anger-filled confrontation is not met, but putting the whole puzzle together, it is clear that it would have been completely unnatural for characters like these.

Janos‘ fake eye-ball is the only thing he leaves behind and this unusual yet simple object can be a constant reminder of his reporting on his friends, but also of how his reports probably left out parts of what he was witnessing. Ironically, Andor gets to do some reporting of his own: in order to have Janos‘ corpse released from the morgue, he provides information to fill in the necessary documents.

By Mirona Nicola