Here's one directed by Karoly Makk. I wrote this in a blog a long time ago, when I was a better writer.   :D 


CAT'S PLAY  (Karoly Makk, 1972)

Sibling love and companionship are the all-encompassing themes in Karoly Makk's Cat's Play, a movie that captures felicitously and bittersweetly a nostalgia for more carefree and youthful times -- for a world that can no longer be recovered. Two sisters -- through the rapidly-outmoded medium of handwritten letters -- conduct a faithful and conscientious correspondence that belies the great distance that separates them. But it's not all a portrait of intimate sisterhood that we witness in Karoly Makk's universe; other dimensions of feeling, other aspects of relationships -- in particular, their seemingly contrasting if not clashing personalities -- find expression in this finely crafted film founded on what might be called sisterly billets-doux.
 
Cat's Play is centered -- sometimes confusingly until the story hits its stride in midstream -- on the voice-over readings of letters between Erzsi and Giza, two sisters who seem destined to live apart and for the most part, alone. Their intimate letters almost always hark back to an innocent and idyllic place in their childhood: a virtual time capsule for us as Makk intersperses soft-focus images and vignettes -- compositions that are redolent of old photographs -- of younger lives and innocence. In their letters, the sisters broach photographs and mementos, how they can no longer be found, or otherwise frayed by time and remembrance.
 
It is not all nostalgia, however, as we hear the consequences of sharpened familiarity and candidness. Erzsi is a music teacher in Budapest who seems fiercely protective of her independence, relishing her city life even as her one romantic flame Viktor has been less than faithful. She has a younger helper at home, Mousey, whose very nickname suggests a note of condescension from the house's mistress. An amusing aspect of their relationship is how they communicate endearingly by making cat's miaows, but their intimacy remains limited.
 
Giza lives in a distant but undisclosed place, bedridden and paralyzed by an accident. Her letters to Erzsi often assume the tone of an older sister, at times repelling the younger and stubborn sibling. Giza does not make a mystery of her desire for Erzsi to reunite with her no matter how many times she has been rebuffed.
 
Makk charts with realism the emotional ebb and flow between the two sisters through their letters, their mutual love for one another contrasting with their strong personalities. Makk's thematic obsession has been to depict the whole spectrum of female relationships, loves of different kinds: lesbian love in Another Way and that of a daughter- and mother-in-law in Szerelem. In Cat's Play, Makk portrays a love that reflects the brutal pace of modern times, a love that refuses to transport itself to the pragmatics of the present.