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This is the writer/director, Eva Gardos' own story. It begins with the young actress Scarlett Johansson, cast as Suzanne, standing on a bridge in Budapest. The year is 1965. "I was 15 and my life was already falling apart," she says, "so I came back to Hungary where it all began." What follows is an extended flashback to 1950. A married couple, Margit and Peter, played by Natassja Kinski and Tony Goldwyn, have to escape from Hungary. They have two young daughters and can only take the older one who is five years old. They have to leave the baby behind because it would be too dangerous if the baby cried. We see their escape and feel their tension -- bribing guards, running across a field, traveling in a train dressed as peasants. We see their love for their baby and the distress when they find out that their plans for having her
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smuggled out to join them in Vienna are thwarted. To save the baby, the Grandmother, played by Agnes Banafalvy, makes arrangements to have the baby raised by a childless peasant couple, Teri and Jeno, played by Zsuzsa Czinkoczi and Balazs Galko. They come to love the little girl as their own and she grows up loving them as well. In the meantime, the Margit and Peter and their older daughter arrive in America. They never stop trying to get their younger daughter out by writing letters to public officials. Finally, after six years, they obtain permission to bring their little girl to America.
I enjoyed the film tremendously, felt emotion for each of the characters - the parents, the grandmother, the peasants who loved her, and even the older sister with her own form of sibling rivalry. Mostly though, I felt for the little six-year-old girl
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