Gloomy Sunday Review

Gloomy Sunday Review

“High romance like those American movies of the 1940’s”

‘Gloomy Sunday’ was an international pop hit of 1933, written by a couple of denizens of the Hungarian equivalent of Tin Pan Alley and made famous in the U.S. by Billie Holiday. The movie of the same title imagines a more romantic genesis. It has the piece written by a broody piano player (Stefano Dionisi) at a restaurant as a seemingly hopeless love offering to its manager (Erika Marozsan), who is the mistress of its wry, civilized owner (Joachim Krol). Or maybe not so hopeless. The trio enters into a sweet-spirited menage a trois, and the Weltschmerz-laden song ascends the charts, but with this odd bullet attached: quite a few people have it on the record player when they commit suicide. The song’s climb prefigures Nazism’s rise — and the demise of the old, gemutlich Europe symbolized by the restaurant. All this sounds improbably melodramatic, but that reckons without considering the tone German director and co-writer Rolf Schubel establishes, a kind of sweet-tart nostalgia that’s capable of accommodating the muted horror of the film’s later passages as well as a great morally balancing surprise ending. It also reckons without taking into account the acting, especially Krol’s combination of innocence and worldliness and Marozsan’s blend of yielding and manipulation. The film is high romance, rather like those American movies of the 1940s — people snatching at happiness in a world aflame. We don't make them anymore — stupid us — but we ought to be glad someone does.

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