MY WAY HOME  (Miklos Jancso, 1965)


Something about the images of war haunts and fascinates 
Joseph, a wide-eyed 17-year-old partisan who wanders across 
the Hungarian plains on his way home in the final days of 
Second World War. He lingers on a war-torn landscape,
and seems uninterested to continue his journey home. 
He has not anticipated what will happen shortly. In short order,
the bewildering and harsh lessons of war are brought home
to him, as he gets variously caught in a series of internments 
and arrests by renegade Cossacks, bandits, and the advancing 
Red Army.
 
As a prisoner of war, Joseph experiences firsthand the
horrors and absurdities of war. He comes close to death
as he is lumped together with common bandits who are
promptly executed by the Soviets. Released on one of his
captors' pure whims, he wanders around trying to find
armaments left behind and marvels at reconnoitering planes.
Caught wearing a Nazi uniform, he is captured by Soviet 
troops again but is spared by virtue of his Hungarian documents. 
Instead he is sent to a cow farm manned by a wounded 
soldier who is no older than he is. He becomes the soldier’s 
assistant in milking the cows, and although they hardly speak 
each other’s language at first, they form a strong friendship.
 
This brotherly bond between the two is captured in a series
of scenes of idyllic bliss, scenes that might remind us of the 
memories of the young protagonist in Tarkovsky's Ivan's 
Childhood: shooting at frogs with pistols, toppling Greek 
statues, chasing after bathing girls, goofing around among ruins. 
Scenes that contrast bittersweetly with the evidence of war. 
All manner of play enjoyed by teenage boys. Young Joseph also 
starts to learn the foreigner’s language and absorbs his thinking, 
no more apparent than in a scene where he puts on the soldier’s 
uniform and pretends to be one of the Red Army in order to 
get help for his bedridden friend. Reminiscent of the freeze-frame 
of Antoine Doinel that ends Truffaut’s 400 Blows, a close-up 
of young Joseph’s bewildered face ends this movie, coinciding 
with the end of war, his own freedom marred by a rude 
awakening that he must flee from.
 
Filmed in stark black and white, My Way Home reflects
many of the themes to be found in Jancso’s other films
set in war, namely Round-Up and Red and White. It is
not so much a pessimistic view of war depicted here as it is 
one of  naturalism; few virtues can be attributed to war, after
all. It's been told many times before but the retelling here
is done with little comment: the depiction of war's aberrations
happens without warning, not lingered on and sometimes 
in long shots that remove a sentimental meditation on them. 
The characters are merely figures -- without faces and names 
-- caught in the sad dynamics of war. What remains in the final 
reckoning are the human casualties, abused and dehumanized 
by the changing vicissitudes of war. To the victor, as the  old 
adage goes, the spoils. Jancso does not wallow in the dark 
nature of war, however, as the camera captures an uncommon 
friendship between captor and prisoner. The scenes involving 
the two boys are the most diverting,  the mine-littered Hungarian 
plains receding farther and farther back into an almost forgotten 
backdrop.