NICE NEIGHBOR, THE (w/ guest Zsolt Kezdi-Kovacs, Director)

English Title: NICE NEIGHBOR, THE (w/ guest Zsolt Kezdi-Kovacs, Director)

The acute housing shortage prevalent in Eastern Europe provides a basis for comedy, bringing together people with all sorts of interesting characters, particularly the conniver who poses as THE NICE NEIGHBOR. Dibusz (Laszlo Szabo) lives in a hole-in-the-wall, a single room without bath. The old house is to be torn down and its tenants relocated in proportionately equal space in new homes. Dibusz wants something bigger and better for himself, so he pretends to be helping his neighbors while single-mindedly pursuing self-interests. He courts a spinster who lives with another woman, hoping to join her room with his after marriage. Finding security in numbers, he enlists the partnership of a large family who has one room, beds down with another partner's wife, finagles another room from a paranoid woman after making her another bedfellow, and even tries to include the room of an old professor who receives young boys as visitors. You can't help liking Dibusz, despite his machinations, and he makes a sort of familial group out of the diverse neighbors. But when they all have to leave, the group isn't moved exactly as Dibusz had planned. Maybe “nice” guys do finish last. “Director Zsolt Kezdi-Kovacs keeps this from slipping into sentimentality and creates a shrewd human comedy. . .” – Variety