Twentieth Century Blues
With a title like "My Twentieth Century" you would think the film would be about the twentieth century. Well it is and it isn't.

The film was directed by Ildiko Enyedi (his debut film) and won the Cannes film festival's "Camera d' or".

We follow two girls Dora and Lili (both played by the extremely beautiful Dortha Segda, who makes her debut here as well and might not be commonly known, is actually not Hungarian, she's Polish) who are sisters which were seperated at birth. Each girl takes a different path in life. Dora is a carefree lively spirit. Lili is very political and much more serious minded.

Enyedi tells these characters stories as the twentieth century is taking shape. No "defining" moments of the century are presented as a backdrop of any event in these girls life but the movie does make some references to sex and politics.

Besides Segda's performance, which is as pure as any you will ever see, the film doesn't quite reach the grand ambitious Enyedi has set for the film. Though it is not deserving of some of the comments it has been getting. If some people feel the movie takes on too much, that is the exact opposite reaction I had to the film. I thought it could have taken on more! Where were moments dealing with World War 1? And since this is a Hungarian film I thought there would be some mention of 56.

What we seem to have here is yet again another case of people being a little "tougher" and critical of a film because it is Hungarian.

Hungarian films aren't exactly sweeping across U.S. theatres. For some reason or other Eastern European films seem to have a difficult time getting distributed in this country, regardless of which country they are from.

Some moments in "My Twentieth Century" are quite good. There are a few humorous moments, some wonderful cinematography and as I already mentioned Segda's performance is very impressive especially when you consider it was her first role.

This is quite an ambitious film for a first timer. Much could have went wrong but Enyedi displays a good visual eye and demonstrates a clear understanding of how to tell an effective story. Sadly he hasn't done much which has caught the public's eye. He did direct a film called "Simon magus " (aka Simon the Magician) which managed to create some buzz.

"My Twentieth Century" (aka Az en xx. szazadom) could have touched upon more moments in history and try to build that into the story but there are small delights to be found in this film if you are willing to look. Walk in with an open mind.

Bottom-line: Ambitious film from first time director Ildiko Enyedi that doesn't go far enough. Needed to show us more of the twentieth century and its defining moments.

One of my favorite movies
I would just like to add that I found many of the scenes quite funny, e.g. I particularly like the short sequence when the camera followed one of Pavlov's dogs on its adventures, after it escaped from the lab.

excepte l'amour
"My Twentieth Century", is not a vulgarly prosaic film about human extremities amidst the grandiosity of technology, but of love amidst the ideological milieu that scientific acheivement engenders. If one can understand that woman/man is still the highest corporeal food in the universe this filmic "gordian knot" unravels easily. If one cannot understand this it is the result of an atrophying of the meaning of the ethereal for which the blame can be assigned not to science but, to that field of defiling abstractions called politics--of the 20th century kind.

Awesome filmaking in black and white and a good story..
It was definitely an interesting experience first watching this film, the story involves two twin girls who are poor and destitute, who are taken and separated, Dorota Segda in the starring role as the late mother of the twin girls and the dual role of the twin girls, who live different but separate lives, one a frivolous woman of privilege and the other a disenfranchised revolutionary who unbeknownst to each other fall into a love triangle with the same man and unbeknownst to him too. The story takes at the begining of the industrial revolution, begins with the invention of the light bulb and ends with the invention of the telegraph, the director manages to intertwine the period history with the human story above, the cinematography I feel is awesome without having to be aware of it, and works great in black and white, so well that you would almost hate to see it colorized, if this ever comes out on DVD I'm definitely grabbing it..

Confusing and incoherent
I am neither "rigid" nor "quasi-mature" (as one reviewer supposed anyone who disliked the film must be), and I have more than an average share of intelligence; I also know how to appreciate an art film, and certainly don't expect all films to be blandly Hollywood-formulaic, but I also expect some semblance of coherency. This film simply jumped around from scene to scene, vignette to vignette, with nothing to hold it together. On the positive side, there were a few good, promising moments -- e.g., the opening with the Edison demonstration, the supposedly "feminist" lecture, the development of the mistaken-identity romance/seduction of the man vis-a-vis the two sisters -- but none of it was ever really developed or connected, in the end I was left wondering what the hell had happened, and was there a point to it all? Or maybe that was supposed to be the point.

On the whole, I've seen better. Much better. This one did not begin to live up to the hype on the case.