The Door

Magda is a writer trying to become a novelist and cannot keep up with the housework. The neighbours recommend Emerenc to her: an old woman everyone in the street knows and nobody is allowed inside to see. Emerenc does the work faultlessly but sets her own rules; she decides when she comes, what she does and who she will speak to. Her own door she opens to no one. The source is Magda Szabó's novel, which draws heavily on her own life, and the writer character is called Magda too. István Szabó's film builds the bond between the two women not as a friendship but as a relation of power: who needs whom, who is protecting whom, never becomes clear. Emerenc's past is bound up with Hungary's twentieth century. Helen Mirren plays Emerenc and Martina Gedeck plays Magda. The door that opens at the end changes everything.