The notebook
The Notebook
Every review of this excellent Hungarian wartime drama has to start the same way: No, not that Notebook! Anyone looking for Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams in the adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks novel is 10 years too late and in quite the wrong theatre.
This one goes by the Hungarian title A Nagy Füzet, translated from the French novel Le grand cahier. All of which suggests that calling it The Big Notebook might have avoided a lot of unnecessary confusion.
In any case, this Notebook starts in the summer of 1944. War borders being what they were, the Kingdom of Hungary then cozied up against the eastern flank of Nazi Germany. A woman has brought her twin sons (played by brothers László and András Gyémánt) to this region to wait out the conflict in the company of her curmudgeonly, alcoholic and possibly mariticidal mother.
The old woman never goes by any other name than grandmother (what the boys call her) or the witch (used by everyone else in town), but that’s fine since we never learn the preteens’ names either. She simply calls them both “bastard.”
Mother’s parting words are for them to continue their studies, a piece of advice they take to with frightening thoroughness. At first they peruse their father’s encyclopedia for general knowledge, and his Bible for reading, writing and memorization practice. But soon they start learning from those around them, and decent role models are scarce.
Whipped and insulted after being falsely accused of thievery, the boys decide to toughen their bodies and souls against future abuse. When they find a dying soldier who has not eaten for four days they go on a hunger strike, again on the assumption that what doesn’t kill them will make them stronger. All this training perturbs grandmother, especially when they refuse her soup and demand a beating for doing so.
It’s a weird character study, and it’s never clear exactly where it’s going to lead. “We don’t like to kill, but we have to get used to it,” one of the boys says, as he describes how they start with beetles and work their way up.
Later, when they blackmail a priest who has sexually abused their friend, he asks if they follow the commandments. No, they tell him, but neither does anyone else. Even the Nazi officer who takes lodging with grandmother doesn’t seem to know what to make of these two moral enigmas.
Director János Szász, who helped adapt the novel, provides a stark setting for the story, aided by cinematographer Christian Berger, who worked on Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Caché. The war is grinding up the inhabitants, their principles and, it seems, the very colour from their homeland.
Oddly for a European Second World War film, The Notebook does not dwell on the Holocaust. When it does impinge on the young protagonists, we learn that they are as a-religious as they are amoral and apolitical. They’re not out to save anyone except themselves, but when a friend is caught in the clutches of the Final Solution, they decide that the one who gave him up deserves punishment.
If there is a flaw in this tale, it is that, as the war winds down, so too does the tension. The twins long ago decided that separation from one another was the one privation they could not bear; but this makes the film’s ending all the more mysterious. Even so, its young protagonists will not leave your mind quickly; we are left to wonder, shiveringly, what use their education will be in a postwar world. The Notebook opens Sept. 26 in Toronto and Montreal, with other cities to follow.