It is 1956; Budapest is in the midst of a bloody uprising. Torocsik is engrossed in reading and rarely ventures out of doors. Her grandson is ecstatic because his school has been shut down until the curfew is lifted. He is confined to his home with the remainder of his family, which
includes his unemployed father, Garas, and his mother, Hernadi, who has secretly begun an affair. His eight-year-old sister, Karasz, perpetually bewilders the family with her obscene and slanderous remarks. At one point, Toth decides to break into the school building to retrieve his grandmother's
typewriter; he is apprehended by the brutal custodian and beaten. Back home, Karasz's sudden coughing fit leads to fears of whooping cough, and a doctor is summoned. The doctor, a young and attractive female, examines Toth, an experience that leads to the boy's sexual awakening. The children then
take advantage of a rare opportunity to enjoy the outdoors by undertaking a rail journey with a group of their school friends on a borrowed flat car. They glide along through the forest until a group of soldiers opens fire on them, killing one of their classmates. Meanwhile, Garas longs for his
wife, who has left him to spend the night with her lover. After the insurrection has been quelled, Torocsik is jailed for allegedly printing subversive material with her typewriter. When she is released, she marches directly to the roof of her building and pulls the alarm, setting off a violent
and deafening wail.
"Most people wanted to survive the shooting outside the house. They wanted to survive history and go beyond it," explains director Peter Gardos about the focus of his second feature film. This is a charmingly astute portrait of a small world turned upside down by the cataclysmic events of 1956.
The story follows the exploits of an ordinary family, one of the multitude of fearful ones during the uprising, who shut their doors and windows to the terror of the outside world. In his earlier film, THE PHILADELPHIA ATTRACTION (1985), Gardos explored the obsessive yearnings and the accompanying
solitariness of the artist; in WHOOPING COUGH, he focuses on the frustrated artistic inclinations of a common man who rarely explores either of these leanings. The bond of Garas's family loosens as its individual members compromise their commitment to the unit. The delight he feels over his
artistic intents forces him to experience the pain of vulnerability when he's greeted with criticism from his judgmental family. Eventually his children arrive at the painful realization that he and the members of the family are just ordinary people and that their attempts at displaying creativity
produce little more than hollow failures. Yet, unbeknownst to any of them, it is their ordinary actions that produce the real artistic creativity. Winner of the top prize at the 1987 Chicago International Film Festival. leave a comment
