Melodrama is another complex feature film by Peter Gothár in a matchless and vital style, a kind of baroque form of surrealism. The film looks at contemporary Hungary through the eyes of Feri, who has spent twenty years in jail. Now, after his release, he has a few scores to settle and Gothár’s very mobile camera follows him closely.These old scores involve events which took place twenty years earlier, in August 1968,. That was when ‘friendly troops’ from the Warsaw Pact moved into Czechoslovakia. Feri and Tomka, friends since childhood, are involved as Hungarian soldiers. They were called up for military service together and served together in the same company. During the intervention in the neighbouring country, they both fall in love with Jula, a Hungarian girl who lives in Slovakia. She soon turns out to be pregnant and it is not clear whether Feri or Tomka is the father, but the three of them decide that it isn’t really important. They decide to flee together to the West in a captured tank; Vienna is only half an hour away by car. When Feri jumps out of the tank at the border, the other two do not follow him. Are they afraid or have they betrayed him?Their escape is discovered and in the skirmishes that follow, their commander is injured. Feri is arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. After twenty years he is reprieved. His love for Jula is still great. But so is his hatred.
