我的二十世纪

《我的二十世纪》是一部以20世纪初欧洲社会变革为背景的电影。故事围绕着一对孪生姐妹展开，她们选择了完全不同的生活道路。一个成为了富人们心目中的名媛，以勾引富有男人为乐；而另一个则成为了无政府主义者，从事恐怖活动，甚至身上绑着炸药。然而，命运却将她们引导到了同一辆东方快车上，并且她们还与同一个男人发生了关系，却并不知情。当她们最终面对面相遇时，她们都放下了先前的习性，成为了真正独立的女性。电影以喜剧的方式展现了这一独特的故事情节。通过对20世纪初欧洲社会变革的描绘，观众们可以感受到那个时代的动荡和变革。同时，影片也通过姐妹们的命运交错，探讨了女性独立和自主的主题。《我的二十世纪》以其独特的剧情和喜剧元素，为观众们带来了一场独特的观影体验。影片通过对姐妹们的成长和转变的描绘，向观众们展示了女性在社会变革中的力量和坚韧。这是一部值得观看的电影，它不仅给人带来欢乐，还让人思考和反思。

English Title: My Twentieth Century
Original Title: Az én XX. századom
Year: 1989
Country: Hungary, West Germany, Cuba
Language: Hungarian
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Director/Writer: Ildikó Enyedi
Music: László Vidovszky
Cinematography: Tibor Máthé
Cast:
Dorota Segda
Oleg Yankovskiy
Paulus Manker
Péter Andorai
Gábor Máté
Rating: 7.2/10

Hungarian female director Ildikó Enyedi’s ON BODY AND SOUL (2017), her first feature in 18 years, is the recipient of 2017 Golden Berlin Bear, so it is high time to reappraise her under-seen body of work, here comes her dazzling Black-and-White feature debut MY TWENTIETH CENTURY.

Capitalizing on the monochromatic mystique of a bygone era, the story focuses on identical twins Dora and Lili (Segda, a ), born in 1880, after their mother died and selling matches on a freezing cold night in Budapest, they are snatched away and lead separate lives. Their path will converge again in 1900, the turn of the century on the Oriental Express. Dora, a pert minx, dallies her way through men’s courtship and rooks them as much as she can, whereas Lili, a dour-looking revolutionist, carries on a bomb-attacking mission with steely resolution. Unbeknown to each other, both’s lives will soon be entangled with a mysterious middle-aged man Z (Yankovskiy, a magnetic cipher-like presence), a constellation of vignettes are engendered by alternating between Dora and Lili in their aggressive/passive sexual/power tugs-of-war with an inscrutable Z: playing hard to get, coquettishly libidinous, complete obedient, that is the gist of femininity’s unabashed duality, as a riposte to the sidebar, where the young Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger (played by Paulus Manker with gusto and ridicule), who would kill himself in 1903 at the age of 23, rants about his misogynistic take on women’s “whore/mother” dichotomy in front of a flock of suffragettes. In the hyper-surreal denouement, Dora and Lili finally meet inside a hall of mirrors (a motif almost runs to platitude), later arrives Z, ushered by a mule, a metaphor of men’s intransigence and if one recalls, it also heralds the twins’ separation at the first place.

The surreal touch is what makes Enyedi’s daring debut a novelty, picking up the baton from erstwhile Mitteleuropa New Wave standard bearers (Vera Chytilová’s DAISIES 1966, Jaromil Jires’ VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS 1970, to name a few within the knowledge of this reviewer), Enyedi interpolates these elements to impart her rumination on more abstract aspects: nature vs. human (the monologue of a Zoo-trapped chimp, a lab dog on the lam confronting a railway train, other topographic arrangements), cosmology (Greek chorus of glistening stars), and technology (Edison’s discovery opens and bookends the film, cinematograph, etc.), but this smorgasbord of ideas and conceptions fail to organically connect with the diegesis, a rookie indulgence for starters, often bite off more than one can chew - making every film as the last one. This approach does impinge on the cohesion of its central narrative, which could have been marshaled into a more scintillating doppelgänger charade. Yet, if eccentricity and diverse nuggets are what the filmmaker intends to chalk up, Enyedi has done a bang-up job!

Experimental but mesmerizing, compendious yet idiosyncratic, and particularly has a unique eye for lightning and mise-en-scène, MY TWIENTH CENTURY is a symphonic pastiche of cinematic tricks and an unsparing feminist manifesto beckons for a more effervescent reception.

referential points: Vera Chytilová’s DAISIES (1966) 7.6/10; Jaromil Jires’ VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (1970) 6.9/10

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