Search - Down By Love on DVD

A NEGLECTED JEWEL

Peter Hogarth | Pittsboro, NC United States | 01/21/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I discovered Down By Love at random in the local VisArt. The hideous cover art is offputting and, while slightly justifiable in light of the overall symbolism of the film, has nothing to do with its predominant imagery and aesthetics. The transfer is not anamorphic - it is made for 4:3, not for widescreen, and is letterboxed top and bottom. If you zoom it on a wide TV, you won't be able to see the subtitles. And the quality of the transfer is dismal.

In other words, you will watch Down By Love the way you discover a diamond in a coalbin. In an ironic way, the griminess of the transfer makes you feel even more the forbidden voyeur, as you watch the life of the beautiful, elfin young Eva (Patricia Kovacs) careen into catastrophe.

Down By Love unfolds almost entirely in Eva's Budapest flat. The color of Down By Love is red - the color of the flat's walls, the color of love, and the color of blood. After a while, it becomes the color of the inside of Eva's brain, as the depths of her entrapment in a miasmic love become apparent.

Most of this story unfolds by telephone - by land and by mobile - each with its own ring, greeting, protocol. We are inside Eva's brain, and the jangling telephones are the neurons from the outside world, from which information is received, selectively discarded, and distorted into her massive delusion of fantastic, doomed love.

The camera is wry: A beautiful, forelorn sprite arises from her bathtub. For a moment your hope is whetted for the measure of skin that is eurostandard for this juncture. But no, this camera would like to leave you hungry, you will only see enough, a fraction of a second, to ache for what you are not seeing. For what refuses to become real. Just like her love.

The camera is wry: Eva has prepared dinner. The candles are lit. She sits at the table, talking to her older adulterous lover, Tibor, about how she has cooked all day, made him his favorite paella. As she talks, the camera slowly makes a complete circle around the table. And Tibor is not there. This is her monologue, going on in the interior of her mind, descending into bitterness, on the subject of his constant absence.

The deftness of this film, the artfulness of the cutting, the sequence of fragments you are given to piece together into Eva's plight - all these are masterful. This apparently little-known film must be seen to be believed."