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My Twentieth Century(Az én XX. századom)

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Hungary, West Germany, Cuba · 1989
1h 42m
Director Ildikó Enyedi
Starring Dorota Segda, Paulus Manker, Péter Andorai, Gábor Máté
Genre Comedy, Drama

Separated identical twins ride an Orient Express unaware of each other: a feminist anarchist and a hedonistic courtesan, living under the powder-keg Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Separate families adopted the impoverished orphans. At the dawn of the 20th Century the double-blind experiment hits crescendo for Dora & Lili, born the evening Edison unveiled his incandescent bulb. In 1900, technology was accelerating, could women's rights and national self-determination keep pace?

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What are critics saying?

80

Washington Post by Desson Thomson

Quite unintentionally, Ildiko Enyedi's My Twentieth Century demonstrates the importance of a good story in a film. The movie doesn't really have one, but this shortcoming, which keeps the Hungarian film unmistakably shy of greatness, is its only fault.

60

Washington Post by Hal Hinson

My 20th Century is like a dream, without a unifying logic -- ravishing fragments without coherence or meaning. Immersed somewhere in all this are Enyedi's meditations on the true nature of women, the shortcomings of 20th-century progress, and the connections between art and science. Yet though her own inventiveness and witty command of the medium are invigorating, her thinking is so scrambled that her originality is undermined. The movie is overintellectualized and yet not fully thought out.

80

Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas

My Twentieth Century (Times-rated Mature for sex, complex style and themes) remains on the whole buoyant and beguiling--and is surely among the most distinctive films to arrive this year.

100

The New York Times by Vincent Canby

My 20th Century, a new Hungarian film written and directed by Ildiko Enyedi, is a number of wondrous things. It's a bracing combination of wit, invention, common sense and lunacy. It's a gravely comic meditation on civilization at the turn of this century. It's also about light and shadow and electricity, Thomas Alva Edison, movies and what it's like to be Hungarian in a world where no one is quite sure where Hungary is.

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