Summary
A war-ravaged Carpathian hamlet, January 1919: smoke still coils from gutted Orthodox cupolas while frost glazes the abandoned field telephones. Into this hush strides János, a former Habsburg dragoon whose coat bears no insignia, only a hand-stitched dove of muslin. He carries no orders—only a blood-blotted railway timetable and a vow to drag the hamlet’s surviving children, widows, and deserters across the chaotic new border before the next dawn. Standing in his path is Captain Strasser, an Austro-Hungarian holdout who has requisitioned the monastery wine cellars and converted the communion rail into a machine-gun nest. Strasser believes the armistice is a rumor; he keeps the villagers hostage as living proof that the Empire still pulses. Between predator and shepherd wanders Erzsébet, a Red Cross nurse whose face is a palimpsest of earlier massacres: Galicia, the Isonzo, now here. She alone recognizes that János’s timetable is not a schedule but a psalm—each crossed-out station a stanza of penance. Over the course of one charcoal night, the film becomes a Stations of the Cross in reverse: instead of ascending to Golgotha, the procession descends toward the river ford, stripped of every civic certainty. A mute Jewish boy steals the village’s last bell and drags it by rope, leaving a snail-trail of bronze sparks on the cobbles; a pregnant Roma girl barters her wedding coins for three bullets she never intends to fire; the town notary burns the land-registry so that no deed can outlive the dead. Curtiz’s camera glides above them like an exhausted angel, alighting on faces lit by magnesium flares that turn frost into sequins. When dawn finally breaches the ridgeline, the border is not a line on a map but a frieze of silhouettes wading through fog, backs to the viewer, toward a country that does not yet exist. The last shot—an iris-in on the bronze bell half-submerged in icy water—suggests history itself is a sunken hymn, tolling where no ears remain.
