Cinema: Innocent Radical

ANGIVERA

Directed and Written by Pal Gabor

Angi Vera is a film of paradoxes. The setting—at least for Americans—is at once exotic and dismal. The heroine, Angi Vera, is a fierce mouse. The style is gentle, almost pensive, yet the tale told is near savage in its implications.

The place is Hungary in 1948, during the Communist takeover. Angi Vera (her surname is placed first, according to the custom of the country), a nurse's aide, publicly denounces inhumane and corrupt treatment—bourgeois backsliding, as it were—in the hospital where she works.

Her reward is a scholarship to an adult-education institution where the Communists...