Pampered Darlings

About

Dédelgetett kedvenceink - "our pampered darlings" - sounds like a lullaby, but director Györgyi Szalai meant it as the opposite: a document of how Hungarian society pampers its young by abandoning them to the slot they were born into. Fourteen-year-old Orsi Szentesi, a budding artist from Budapest, spends a summer in the village of Boldogkőváralja with her brother. She paints landscapes to keep the world at a safe distance, even as first love disrupts her detachment. The film looks like a coming-of-age idyll. It is not one. Szalai belonged to the Budapest School, a documentary-fiction movement that refused to use professional actors and refused to tell a single story. Pampered Darlings works as a "fresco" - lives placed side by side horizontally rather than ranked vertically. The rich kid from the city and the local boys who will become miners or smelters before they turn sixteen share the same frame. Above the village looms a medieval castle ruin; on the horizon, the Visonta power plant smokes and swallows young bodies. When a boy dies at the plant, the only available gesture is to burn a hay bale. The landscape Orsi paints is already poisoned. This was Szalai's first and only solo feature, made under punishing conditions: a flood washed away the children's tents, a defective camera forced 10,000 meters of reshoot, and the crew worked in near-freezing July temperatures. The screenplay was written by her lifelong collaborator István Dárday. The state studio's artistic council deemed the film "anti-intellectual" - not because it defied censorship directly, but because its mere depiction of rural immobility contradicted official ideology. It was not banned but it was neglected, and it never received a proper international release. (vivi - Nevix)

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