Gloomy Sunday

In 1930s Budapest, the restaurant owner Laszlo hires the pianist András. Both fall in love with Ilona, the waitress, and rather than break the triangle up, Ilona accepts it. The one piece András composes for her is first loved and then feared: a run of suicides is said to follow the melody. As the war closes in, the story leaves private life and joins history. Rolf Schübel's German and Hungarian co-production builds fiction around a real song. Szomorú vasárnap was composed in the 1930s by Rezső Seress, with lyrics by László Jávor. It became known worldwide, was recorded by everyone from Billie Holiday to Björk, and gathered an urban legend that listeners took their own lives. The film does not endorse the legend but uses it as material. Who it's for: Viewers who like period melodrama, love triangles built around music, and the atmosphere of pre-war Central Europe. Who it's not for: The melodrama is laid on thick and the suicide legend sits at the center of the narrative. How the Holocaust section is grafted onto the romance is also open to argument.