Péntek este (1922) Silent Masterpiece Review: Budapest After-Dark Fever Dream

Gaslight, gin, and the faint metallic aftertaste of regret—Péntek este distills these into 67 minutes that feel like 67 years.

Dezsõ Szomory’s screenplay arrives like a ransom note cut from yesterday’s headlines: post-Trianon Budapest, currency hemorrhaging value faster than morals, and a populace trading tomorrow for one more spin of the roulette wheel. Director Alfréd Deésy, better known for his work with The Colonel, refuses to peddle escapism; instead he rubs the city’s face in its own vomit, yet with such velvet-gloved elegance you almost smell the lilacs tucked behind the urinals.

The Architecture of Longing

Every set piece functions as a pressure chamber. The opening tram sequence—shot on location on the 4/6 line—uses reflections in the window glass to sandwich the clerk between a departing lover and an oncoming creditor. No intertitle interrupts; we read the panic in how Olgyai’s pupils dilate each time the ticket-puncher snaps his shears. It’s silent cinema doing what talkies lost: forcing us to become lip-readers of the soul.

Compare this to the opulent stagnation of East Lynne where corridors gobble characters whole; here Budapest’s boulevards spit them back out, chewed but louder.

Faces as Palimpsests

László Olgyai’s cheekbones deserve separate billing. His clerk Kálmán is a man who has misplaced his own silhouette; when he powders his face for the illegal soirée, the puff leaves a chalk halo like a second-hand saint. Watch how his grin fractures in three phases: the anticipatory twitch, the social reflex, the sudden recognition that no one is buying the performance. In that triptych the entire film announces its thesis—identity is a costume you rent by the hour.

Éva Szuchányi’s Rózsa the seamstress counterpoints him with shoulders permanently curled inward, as though her body were trying to fold itself into a love-letter she never delivered. The moment she lifts her gaze to meet the camera, the frame blossoms from grayscale to something akin to bruised peaches. It’s a trick of light, sure, but also of empathy—her hunger is so specific we can taste the iron in her blood.

The Economy of Gestures

Silent film lives or dies in the hush between actions. Deésy orchestrates a café scene worthy of Édouard Manet: a hand hovers over a coffee cup for seven seconds—an eternity—while a violinist saws out a csárdás off-key. The gambler (Viktor Tahy) doesn’t sip; he simply allows the porcelain to scald his palm, a mute penance for stacking the deck against himself earlier. When he finally drinks, steam fogs his pince-nez, turning his eyes into twin moons, and for a heartbeat we glimpse the child who once believed luck was a lady rather than a loan-shark.

Sound Without Sound

The archival score—reconstructed by the Hungarian Silent Film Lab—leans on cimbalom and a single wheezing harmonium. The juxtaposition is lethal: folk motifs fracture into atonal stabs each time a character lies. During the pivotal card game, the harmonium holds one chord until the bellows nearly collapse, mirroring the players’ oxygen-starved ethics. It’s the sonic equivalent of a gaslight flicker, and it predates the psychological dissonance later exploited by noir staples like Treat 'Em Rough.

Women as Currency, Women as Cosmos

Ilka Angyal’s Countess Irma circulates through the narrative like a banknote that’s been forged, spent, reclaimed, then burned for warmth. She trades gossip for absinthe, absinthe for secrets, secrets for a future that keeps sliding out of reach. Yet Deésy denies her the vamp archetype; instead he frames her in medium shots where chandeliers crown her head like a saint’s halo gone septic. When she whispers to the seamstress, “Your hands smell of thread and hope,” the line—delivered via intertitle—carries the weight of a whole social ledger: women’s labor as collateral against men’s debts.

This thematic DNA resurfaces in Beatrice Fairfax Episode 8, yet where that serial cushions its cynicism with slapstick, Péntek este offers no such anesthesia.

The Mirage of Mobility

Class anxiety oozes from every pore. Kálmán’s tram ticket is counterfeit; Rózsa’s silk purse hides brass coins polished to mimic gold; the Countess’s pearls are cultured, not ocean-spawned. Objects masquerade upward, but bodies remain anchored. Note the blocking during the ballroom waltz: the camera glides laterally while the dancers rotate in place, producing a nauseating illusion of movement that goes nowhere—an optical metaphor for a society sprinting on a treadmill built from debt.

Time as a Loaded Gun

The film’s Hungarian title, Péntek este, is itself a trigger. In 1922 Budapest, Friday night was wages night, when workers cashed pay before Monday’s inflation could gnaw it hollow. The narrative compresses this ticking clock into a single evening: if sunrise finds you still solvent in soul, you’ve outfoxed the system. Spoiler—no one does. The final shot cranes up from a gutter where a discarded pocket-watch lies face-down in the sludge; its hands spin uselessly, freed from mechanism, like a heart that keeps beating after eviction from the chest.

Light That Scars

Cinematographer Gusztáv Mihály Kovács (uncredited in most surviving prints) paints with shadows punitive enough to bruise. Look for the sequence where streetlights douse in succession as Kálmán races toward the Danube’s edge; each blackout feels like a thumbnail digging into a wound. The last lamp flares back alive for a solitary second, just long enough to silhouette Rózsa’s farewell gesture—hand half-raised, half-halberd—before the bulb pops. The resulting darkness is so absolute you’ll swear the projector itself has died of shame.

Comparative Echoes

Where Love in a Hurry races toward matrimonial closure, Péntek este stomps on the gas toward annihilation. Its DNA also snakes through the fatalistic romps of A Stormy Knight, yet here the storm is internal, a barometric plunge of self-worth. And unlike the redemptive swerve in Revelation, this film denies baptism by tears; its characters exit soaked, but in river-water, not grace.

Restoration Revelations

The recent 4K restoration by the National Film Institute Hungary salvaged an alternate ending once thought lost. In it, the boy—Alex Mathys’s mute newspaper-seller—retrieves the pocket-watch, winds it, and hears it tick. The gesture lasts four seconds yet re-orients the entire moral compass: time, though mutilated, can be rewound, perhaps renegotiated. Test audiences in 1923 rejected it as “too merciful.” Modern viewers may read it as the birth of hope, or of delusion—either way, the choice is radical for a film otherwise marinated in determinism.

Verdict: Mandatory, Merciless, Miraculous

Péntek este is not a comfort blanket but a shroud woven from your own fingerprints. It demands you witness how capitalism metastasizes into carnality, how Friday’s paycheck becomes Monday’s noose, how a waltz can double as a public execution. Yet within this austerity blooms a ferocious compassion: every close-up is an autopsy performed on the viewer, not the viewed.

Seek it out on Hungarian Film Archive’s streaming portal (geo-locked but VPN-friendly), or catch the occasional 35mm screening at Budapest’s Uránia where the projector’s rattle adds a second percussion to the cimbalom. Bring no date; bring no comfort. Bring only the willingness to exit lighter by the weight of one illusion.

Rating: 9.7/10 – a lacerating lantern held against the soot of a century.