Visszatérés – Retrace (digital director’s cut)

Judit Elek’s so-far last fiction feature is a curious mix of elements.

It started out as an attempt to adapt Marguerite Duras’ 1960 novel Dix Heures et demie du soir en été, and the story of a couple with a teenage daughter driving through a foreign land still forms the narrative backbone of Retrace. It then got augmented with elements from Miklós Mészöly’s 1979 novella Szárnyas lovak, in particular the question of how two people can react differently to the same event. Eventually, it turned into the story of an immigrant returning with her family from her new home in Sweden to the 1980s Romania of the Ceaușescus, and a parallel narrative set partly in the past of her childhood friend, who collaborated with the regimes. Ultimately it found its final shape when Elek added some aspects of her own family history – the gruesome fate of her sister Vera, who was murdered in a concentration camp after being abused as a prostitute for the guards.

The result is one of Elek’s most cerebral works: a mosaic of interlocking narratives in some half-a-dozen languages where home is a melancholic, potentially deadly illusion, and exile maybe the destiny of every decent human being.

– Olaf Möller

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