Fresh Air

A favorite at the Critics' Week of the Cannes film festival, FRESH AIR is a visually brilliant debut by Hungarian director Agnes Kocsis. The film tells the story of a mother and daughter who live together, but whose relationship has somehow so soured that they hardly speak. Viola works as a lavatory attendant in a subway. Teen-aged Angela is in school learning to be a fashion designer. She longs for beauty, for Italy or someplace where her talent might be recognized, but instead she slogs through life in drab post-Communist Budapest . Embarrassed and disgusted by her mother's job, she rushes to open all the apartment windows every time Viola returns from her smelly, subterranean place of work. The women's loneliness is confounded by the fact that they're incapable of sustaining relationships, either with men or with each other. When a dramatic event finally jars them out of their numb existence, it looks as though they might begin to inch toward a sort of mutual understanding. (In Hungarian with English subtitles) – B.B.