Utószezon (1967)

In 1961, during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, a group of retired old gentlemen on the shore of Lake Balaton—former officials of the Kingdom of Hungary, including a former landowner, a state secretary, a general, a court president, and a teacher—spend the off-season drinking beer and teasing one another at a railway-station buffet. They come up with the idea of playing a trick on their friend, the hotel caretaker, who has been “absent without leave” for several days and worked as a pharmacist before the war. They phone him and “summon” him to the county police headquarters. Kerekes is frightened; the cruel prank brings to the surface the guilt he has kept deeply buried. The next day, he boards a train, but instead of going to the police, he travels to a town in the opposite direction, where events from fifteen or twenty years earlier come back to him. Kerekes, an Aryan who once worked as an assistant in the Jewish Szilágyi-Silbermanns’ pharmacy, was not political, but timidly went along with what was happening around him. In front of his childhood friend, police captain Holl Péter, he lets slip a remark beginning “if only,” which leads to his employers being taken away and massacred the next day. What is more, he accepts the pharmacy that is forcibly allocated to him. When he reaches the pharmacy, memories assail him, and the events of the past gradually unfold. Almost beside himself, he wanders through the places where it all happened, fleeing from the events and the people involved. At last he goes into a cinema, where he is confronted in a newsreel, in connection with the Eichmann trial, by harrowing footage of the death camps. His friends, who first follow him secretly and then, seeing how agitated he has become, pursue him to tell him they were only joking, finally manage, after his day-long rampage, to force him back that evening to Sodits’s villa. To their surprise, Kerekes, struggling with a heart attack, demands that the group—who are drunk, and include a retired judge—hear his case. The old gentlemen agree to the grotesque mock trial, but it becomes clear that they understand nothing of the matter—or do not want to. For instance, they ask, with (feigned) innocence: why, exactly, did the Kerekeses not leave? They also hear as a “witness” the police captain, Holl Péter, who has meanwhile been tracked down. In reality he is a happy, contented man: he served his ten years, so his conscience is clear, and he lives very well on generous tips as a gas-station attendant. Laufer, the makeshift court’s prosecutor, lost everyone and everything in Auschwitz. He breaks out of the role assigned to him in the others’ courtroom farce, which is meant to trivialize the case, and demands the defendant’s death. The next day, sober, he cannot apologize enough. Zorkay, the retired judge, nevertheless acquits Kerekes, knowing that any “objective authority” would laugh him out of court for what he did. The next day, Kerekes still goes to the prosecutor’s office to turn himself in, but they send him away. His overwhelming, tormenting guilt and persecutory delusions drive him to attempt suicide, but he fails. In the closing scene, as if nothing had happened, the group is back at the buffet, drinking and discussing the affairs of the world, with Kerekes sitting silently among them. The attempt to face the past has failed; everyone has failed the moral test, and there is no absolution…