László Szabó

László Szabó

Birth : 1936-03-24, Budapest, Hongrie

History

« Dans une petite ville en Hongrie, ma mère est morte au matin d'un lundi de Pâques. J'avais onze ans. L'après-midi, je suis allé au cinéma parce que je n'osais pas rentrer à la maison... ». Dès lors, ainsi qu'il le confiera à Libération, le jeune László Szabó ne cesse de fréquenter les salles obscures. Arrivé en France en 1956, il se lie d'amitié avec les "jeunes Turcs" des Cahiers du cinéma et devient un assidu de la Cinémathèque de Langlois. Claude Chabrol lui offre ses premiers rôles, dans Les Cousins puis A double tour, tous deux sortis en 1959. Compagnon de route de la Nouvelle Vague, il apparaît aussi chez Rohmer (Les Nuits de la pleine lune), Rivette (L'Amour par terre) et François Truffaut (Le Dernier Métro), mais c'est avec Jean-Luc Godard que se noue une collaboration privilégiée. Flic douteux dans Made in USA, ingénieur dans Alphaville, il tient des seconds rôles décalés dans la plupart des films que le cinéaste tourne dans les années 1960, mais on le retrouve en 1982 dans le rôle du producteur dans Passion. Jean-Luc Godard inspire à László Szabó le goût de mise en scène. L'acteur signe en 1973 un polar loufoque, Les Gants blancs du diable, puis, un an plus tard, Zig-Zig, une comédie avec Catherine Deneuve et Bernadette Lafont. Il retourne tourner en Hongrie ses deux longs-métrages suivants David, Thomas et les autres en 1985 et Az ember, aki nappal aludt(L’homme qui dormait le jour) en 2003. Mais László Szabó reste acteur, en France comme en Hongrie. Habitué aux personnages louches, il incarne, à partir des années 1990, des figures paternelles dans les œuvres de ces jeunes héritiers de la Nouvelle Vague que sont Olivier Assayas (L'Eau froide), Arnaud Desplechin (Esther Kahn) ou Mathieu Amalric(Mange ta soupe).

Profile

László Szabó

Movies

Ismael's Ghosts
Henri Bloom
The film tells the tale of a widowed film director who is in the middle of making a film about an atypical diplomat inspired by his brother. While he has started a new life with Sylvia, he still mourns the death of a former lover, Carlotta, who passed away 20 years earlier; then Carlotta returns from the dead, causing Sylvia to run away.
Parc
Balthazar Rutuola
Georges Nail lives in a new suburb. He's married, loves his wife, son and dog. Paul Hammer is good looking, rich and intelligent. But he is torn by his severe judgment of the world and a desire to be part of it. One day, their paths meet. Nail sees this meeting as an opportunity to create a new friendship. On his side, Hammer sees it as a new reason for living : to crucify the perfect image of the happy western man and his incarnation in the person of Georges Nail. A nail is the perfect victim for a hammer.
Gardens in Autumn
When he loses his position as a powerful government minister, Vincent is dropped by his pretty mistress and must begin life anew, without the privileges of power. As he gradually becomes acquainted with milieus which he d either forgotten or never known and a host of sometimes eccentric, often remarkable everyday people, Vincent really begins to start living again.
Un an
Poussin
Victoire wakes up one morning to find the body of her partner, Felix, lying on the floor of her bedroom. Without being able to reconstruct the course of the last few hours, but convinced that she was not completely to blame, she decides to flee. Wherever she is, all bridges are cut, a certain Louis-Philippe, however, curiously always knows how to find her and keeps her informed of the outcome of the "affair". But Louis-Philippe does not tell everything. What is he hiding? Who is who? Who is lying, fabricating, denying, who is the other's denier? And what really happened?
Playing 'In the Company of Men'
Claude Doniol
Power and corruption—and the men who rule with them—are ruthlessly scrutinized in this multilayered French work set in a shadow realm of arms dealers and blood ties. Part Shakespearean family tragedy, part political noir, it recalls such American paranoid thrillers of the 1970s as All the President’s Men and Marathon Man, revealing protagonists who work in the shadows, the unseen kings of the contemporary jungle.
Az ember, aki nappal aludt
Screenplay
Detective Sebők is shot at by a fleeing criminal and then pushed off the road. Sebők breaks his leg. Left by his wife, pensioned by his boss on the basis of false reports, he has a clash with banker Gömöri at the colonel’s party.
Az ember, aki nappal aludt
Director
Detective Sebők is shot at by a fleeing criminal and then pushed off the road. Sebők breaks his leg. Left by his wife, pensioned by his boss on the basis of false reports, he has a clash with banker Gömöri at the colonel’s party.
The Outskirts of Alphaville
Making of Jean Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965)
Special Delivery
Le gardien
An unexpected phone call from a certain Kirsch sets off a crisis between Catherine and Raphaël that will affect all those around them, be they close friends or casual acquaintances.
On appelle ça… le printemps
Jean
Fanfan leaves his friend Charles and thinks he can be accommodated by his friend, Joss. However, at the same time, Joss abandons the marital home. Fanfan and Joss have only to knock on the door of Manu, Fanfan's sister, who gathers them until Mytch, Manu's companion, throws everyone out. The three young women find themselves in the street and continue their run, while their lovers gang up to track them down. The mini-war of the sexes will flare up.
Esther Kahn
Ytzhok Kahn
A Jewish girl in 19th century London dreams of becoming a stage actress.
Seaside, Dusk
Alex gets a well-paid job from his friend Zsolt: he must smuggle drugs from Germany. Alex wants to run away with the money to France, but suffering a car crash he loses his eyesight. One night, calling from a phone box in the street, he makes the acquaintance of a Hungarian woman living in a seaside town in Germany,
The Diary of the Hurdy-Gurdy Man
This is a dark story of a caring movie maker who struggles to make it and also struggles with his demons and obsessions.
Place Vendôme
Charlie Rosen
The story of a woman that remained distracted for a long time from her life, from the passions that made her feel alive. The importance of true love is compared with the material value of diamonds. Only one truly lasts forever. She's got to find the thing that values most for her, the thing that gives psychical stability and real happiness again to her life.
The Alchemist and the Virgin
Charlie Rosen
Mange ta soupe
A young man returns to the family home to face a childhood trauma: his brother's suicide, but nobody in the family is willing to help him.
Modré z nebe
Poetic movie about 3 generations of women.
Up, Down, Fragile
Le père de Louise (voice)
The film will tell what happens to a group of characters, precisely between July 14 and August 15, 1994 in Paris. It will tell the story of three young ladies, Louise, Ninon, Ida, in the summer of 1994, their adventures in the big city. On the streets, in the gardens, in ballrooms and in libraries and lofts, deserted at the time of holidays and summer heat, Louis, Ninon and Ida proceed on mysterious paths.
Son of Gascogne
Self
You're a provincial kid in Paris and suddenly you're the center of attention: Movie stars, famous directors and sexy women are doting on you because they all think you're the son of their long-dead legendary friend. You never knew your dad, but the facts of this famous guy's life suggest that he might have fathered you. Your mom tells you nothing. All the fuss makes you uncomfortable at first but soon you find it's rather fun to be the son of the famous Gascogne. And in the midst of it all you fall in love. It is, after all, springtime in Paris.
Cold Water
Le père de Gilles
An outer suburb of Paris, 1972. Gilles and Christine, both sixteen, are classmates and lovers who have become frustrated with the aloofness of their families and the general monotony of their lives. When the pair are caught shoplifting, Christine's father ships her off to a home for emotionally disturbed children, temporarily putting space between her and Gilles. Luckily for them, though, she escapes and the couple contemplate running away together.
The Children Play Russian
Jack Valenti: The producer
A famous French filmmaker is hired by a major Hollywood producer to make a documentary on the state of post-Cold War Russia. The filmmaker, though, subverts the project by stubbornly remaining in France and casting himself as the title character of Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot," offering up a series of typically Godardian musings on art, politics, the nature of images and the future of cinema.
Laços de Sangue
Pastelero
Lina and Mariana run from an orphanage in Porto towards the south, in search of Lina's father. It is in a difficult and chauvinistic world that they end up finding Alberto who lives with Júlia on a hill somewhere in the Alentejo. Without informing that Maria is their daughter, they try little by little to know why she abandoned her. When they know the reasons, they both plan revenge ... and execute it.
Rome Roméo
David, 50 years old, returns to Rome for an appointment made 20 years earlier. The passion that bound him to the Countess Clara Orsini had ended with a flight to the other side of the world. The woman he finds on the day of the appointment is not the one he loved, but another, his double, his own daughter who bears the same name of Clara. Intimate ties are formed between them as they wander through Rome.
The Last Summer
Imre Horváth and his friends gather to celebrate his wife's birthday. They are confused because of the changes in the country's politics and want Horváth to be much more active politically, but he is more concerned about his affair with his best friend's daughter.
The Big O
Kovacs
A tribute to Orson Welles. When Kovacs meets Agi, he does not know what awaits him: cinema, alcohol and love do not mix well when you are a Hungarian director parachuted into Hollywood...
Tolérance
Bernheim
In the 18th century, English aristocrats had, among their better known strange customs, one really strange one: they kept "ornamental hermits" for their gardens. These were actual people who were willing to live in squalid conditions and serve as something like museum exhibits for the amusement of the wealthy. This movie takes that notion and transfers it to 18th century France. In the story, an English hermit Rupert Everett) has somehow been brought to France in the period following the French Revolution, and prior to the Napoleonic Era, a period (1795-1799) known as "The Directory." He eventually comes down out of his tree into a chateau owned by an Italian nobleman (Ugo Tognazzi) and his wife. Before long, the hermit has washed and bathed and become quite presentable, even charming. However, his appearance in their midst is like a sentence of death for many of those who associate with him.
Pleure Pas My Love
After the suicide of his actress-mother, a young man announces his identity to his father, who happens to be the man who directed his mother's last film.
The Mysterious Death of Nina Chereau
Marais
A woman accused of murder escapes an asylum and her psychiatrist tries to find her.
Le testament d'un poète juif assassiné
Paul Hamburger
This somber drama chronicles the writings of Paltiel Kossover (Michel Jonasz), a Rumanian Jew who was incarcerated in a Stalinist prison. Zupanev (Erland Josephson) is a sympathetic court registrar who smuggles the documents and later presents them to the poet's son Grisha (Vincent David).
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Russian Interrogator
Successful surgeon Tomas leaves Prague for an operation, meets a young photographer named Tereza, and brings her back with him. Tereza is surprised to learn that Tomas is already having an affair with the bohemian Sabina, but when the Soviet invasion occurs, all three flee to Switzerland. Sabina begins an affair, Tom continues womanizing, and Tereza, disgusted, returns to Czechoslovakia. Realizing his mistake, Tomas decides to chase after her.
Accroche-cœur
Leo just broke up with his wife, and the handsome architect wants to enjoy his sadness at this event in solitude. Unfortunately for him, his young girlfriend, an unperceptive sprite, is too much in love with him to let him out of her sight. He is on his way to a resort in the south of France, and despite his persistent, obvious and repeated attempts to get her to leave him alone, she sticks to him like glue.
Volley for a Black Buffalo
Writer
During the years following World War II, a new boy arrives to class 7/c, and the audience learns to know the lives of the drunkard teacher, his husband-cheating wife, the lonely music teacher hiding behind her paper flowers, the wise count deprived of all his properties, the jovial parish priest and especially the buffalo owner of tragic fate who lost his four daughters, alongside with the young protagonist.
Volley for a Black Buffalo
Director
During the years following World War II, a new boy arrives to class 7/c, and the audience learns to know the lives of the drunkard teacher, his husband-cheating wife, the lonely music teacher hiding behind her paper flowers, the wise count deprived of all his properties, the jovial parish priest and especially the buffalo owner of tragic fate who lost his four daughters, alongside with the young protagonist.
Favourites of the Moon
Terrorist
The story revolves around two objects, a rare set of 18th-century Limoges china, and a 19th century aristocratic portrait. As these items are passed, sold, or stolen from one character to another, a giddy round dance of excess begins to take shape, one which suggests that if history doesn't repeat itself, it certainly rhymes. Together with co-writer Gérard Brach, whose other co-writing credits include Repulsion and Tess, Otar Iosseliani uses a feather-light touch to expose the futility of class and social order, making a bagatelle of the concerns of rich and poor alike.
Love on the Ground
Virgil (as Laszlo Szabo)
A fashionable playwright-director offers roles to two young actresses. Shortly after accepting, the actresses notice strange clauses in their contract – namely they must live at the director’s large appartment during rehearsals. Soon thereafter, the mysteries, hallucinations and rivalries begin.
Liberty at Night
Le marionnettiste
A man caught in the midst of the events of Algeria is experiencing a new but fleeting happiness with a young Algerian.
Full Moon in Paris
Painter at Cafe
Louise is dissatisfied with her mundane life in a bleak Parisian new-town. She rents a pied-à-terre in the city so she can experience independence.
Point mort
Writer
A man is shot down in a provincial airport. Despite his wounds he manages to drag himself to his plane bound for Italy, unaware that the killers are already waiting for him at his destination. During the flight he reminisces about the events that led him there. His name is Matou and he was a Formula 1 champion before being banned from racing circuits for causing a fatal accident. Matou ran away in the company of Lena, his employer's girlfriend. But while they were in the open country they got shot at by mysterious pursuers, which was the beginning of a wild manhunt.
Stand Up Crabs, the Sea Is Rising!
Le directeur
Barely out of prison, where she spent five long years, a pretty prostitute sows disorder in the life of a hitherto peaceful couple.
Cinématon XXIX
N°282
Reel 29 of Gérard Courant’s on-going Cinematon series.
Laissé inachevé à Tokyo
A young woman travels to Japan to write a novel.
The Vulture
Kovács százados
Two old women who happen to be pickpockets stole money from Simon, the taxi driver. The police are unable to find the thieves, so Simon decides to find them himself.
Godard's Passion
Laszlo
While shooting a film, the director becomes interested in the unfolding struggle of a young factory worker that has been laid off by a boss who did not like her union activities.
Temporary Paradise
László / Gérard
1943. French POWs escape through Hungary towards the Balkan. Jacques and Gérard are caught and taken to an internment camp at Lake Balaton. Jacques meets Klári here, who was abandoned by her military officer husband for her Jewish origin. Both want to have a short affair, but love unfolds between them.
The Last Metro
Lieutnant Bergen
In occupied Paris, an actress married to a Jewish theater owner must keep him hidden from the Nazis while doing both of their jobs.
Rue du Pied de Grue
Inspecteur Paluche
Wrong-doers
Írnok
The second in command of a group of highwaymen, the only ones left of Hungary's freedom fighters in the late 17th century, has a wife who really, really wants him to come home and stop gallivanting around the countryside. The only way he can figure to do this is to inform on the group to the authorities in as harmless a manner as possible. Unfortunately, these betrayals cause the group to lose many men, and the traitor grows fearful of the authorities. He gives officials every scrap of information he has in return for a full pardon, and he returns home. His wife, when she hears of these events, is infuriated. Such betrayal is far in excess of anything she can condone, and she kills him. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
The Last Judgement But One
A másik nyomozó
The man is promoted and given a new assignment at his work-place. At home, he stares at a video-cassette: it portrays his wife's face in countless versions, she is sometimes simply beautiful, then unfathomable, but it is mostly a sad, closed, lonely face.
Cinématon
N°282
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
La Barricade du Point-du-Jour
Léo Frankel
The Song of Roland
Duc Naimes / Chevalier hongrois
Roland des Roncesvalles is a legendary knight from the age of chivalry in France. In the 11th-century epic La Chanson de Roland, he is depicted as a key figure in halting the advance of the Arabs into France. In this story, the 10th-century legend is staged by a group of 12th-century pilgrims using the 11th-century poem. Their acting is interrupted by a violent peasant uprising, which kills many of the pilgrims. However, one of the survivors, is converted to the peasant cause and later speaks out in favor of more just treatment for the downtrodden.
Dossier 51
Le contact de Sarah Robski
French diplomat Dominique Auphal is put under surveillance by an unnamed secret service. They wish to find a weakness in his life in order to control him politically. Auphal becomes "File no. 51": his private life is spied, analysed and commented.
L'Affiche rouge
Joseph Boczov
A company wants to make a play about Mont Valerien resistant fighters who were shot by the Nazis and the French collaborators.
Adoption
Jóska
When middle-aged Kata realises that her life will only be complete if she has a baby of her own, her longstanding-but-married boyfriend Joska refuses to comply. But by developing an unlikely friendship with the angst-ridden teenage orphan Anna, who is also involved in a controversial relationship, Kata discovers aspects of herself, and her role as a woman, that have gone unexamined throughout her entire, lonely life.
Zig Zig
Writer
Two women work as entertainers and prostitutes to raise enough money for their dream home.
Zig Zig
Director
Two women work as entertainers and prostitutes to raise enough money for their dream home.
Unruly Heyducks
This film, set at the beginning of the 17th century, is the first East-European "Eastern". Bocskai István orders the free Heyducks to shepherd a huge herd of cattle through the country torn to three parts, to the Dalmatian coast, where he can get weapons in exchange, for fighting the Austrians.
Salut, voleurs!
Jo
In this French crime caper film, a young misfit (Jacques Higelin) who has grown tired of his job as a bank teller deliberately gets fired. When some underworld characters ask him to share the layout of the bank so that they can more effectively rob it, he does. He also joins in the robbery. But when members of the gang start shooting at one another, it becomes clear that he is definitely in over his head.
The White Gloves of the Devil
Writer
Crime thriller.
The White Gloves of the Devil
Director
Crime thriller.
Valparaiso, Valparaiso
Lazlo
Alain Cluny is Balthazar, a bumbling middle-aged intellectual who spouts off from time to time about leftist causes, usually to his current girlfriend. Then Edwarda (Bernadette Lafont), who is active in the political underground, comes into his life. From that point on, he begins to act on his beliefs. Edwarda's underground political action group stages a little drama to test Balthazar's commitment and reliability, putting him through an interrogation by what appear to him to be French secret police. Having passed this test, he is given a real assignment. This film is a comedy with elements of satire, and it explores the humor to be found in left-wing pretentiousness of all kinds. - Rovi
The Confession
Secret police man
The vice-minister of Foreign Affairs of Czechoslovakia, knowing he's being watched and followed, is one day arrested and put into solitary confinement by his blackmailers.
Winter Wind
Assistant Director
The preparation, in Hungary, of the assassination in Marseilles of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934.
Do You Know Sunday-Monday?
Szabó mérnök
Juli is a 17-year-old student who takes a summer job in a local chemical factory. She is befriended by Piri, a girl with an unsavory reputation who has worked there before. The two friends are ogled by male workers who have overactive libidos and imaginations. Juli spurns the advances of a deluded Romeo while Piri continues to work and endure open hostility from the older female workers while her slothful parents sink deeper into alcoholism.
Binding Sentiments
Szõlõsgazda
Edit, who became the wife of a politician out of a simple peasant girl, suddenly becomes a widow as a result of an accident. She never loved her husband. She lives a wealthy and lonely life amidst false friends, facing one of the last alternatives of her life, i.e. having to face her past in the hope of an independent new beginning.
Happening
At a reception, the guests amuse themselves with cruel games.
The Fatal Shot
Bandi
Laci and the divorced Klári decide to commit suicide, since neither's parents give them shelter, they have no place to sleep, no decent job and no future. Béla, who lives on stealing cars, joins them. He has a gun. Based on a true story.
Silence and Cry
Detective
Set during a turbulent era of disquiet, fear, persecution and terror, which permeates every corner of post-WWI Hungarian society. In 1919, after just a few months of communist rule the Hungarian Republic of Councils falls victim to a nationalist counter-revolution. Admiral Horthy, leader of the nationalist far right movement, becomes the self-proclaimed regent of Hungary, and assumes power as the legal Head of State. Soldiers of the short-lived Hungarian Red Army are now on the run from relentless secret policemen and patrol units of the nationalist Royal Gendarme. If caught, ex-Red Army soldiers are executed without mercy or proper trial. István Cserzi, a former soldier of the Red Army has fled to the Great Hungarian Plains and has taken refuge on a farm, which is run by two sympathetic women. Due to the generosity of these women and a former childhood pal...
The Girl
Francia autós (uncredited)
A young woman leaves a state orphanage to find her mother in this interesting examination of how the overt repression of women in the older pattern of village life has been replaced by the more subtle exploitation inherent in the apparently freer existence of young girls in the contemporary city.
Le Désir attrapé par la queue
"Desire Caught by the Tail" - Described as surrealistic, absurd, and weird. The narrative is nonlinear and the meaning nearly impossible to decipher, the work has been praised despite, and sometimes for, its lack of message.
Made in U.S.A
Paul Widmark
Paula Nelson goes to Atlantic City to meet her lover, Richard Politzer, but finds him dead and decides to investigate his death. In her hotel room, she meets Typhus, whom she ends up knocking out. His corpse is later found in the apartment of David Goodis, a writer. Paula is arrested and interrogated. From then on, she encounters many gangsters.
Pierrot le Fou
L'Exilé Politique (uncredited)
Pierrot escapes his boring society and travels from Paris to the Mediterranean Sea with Marianne, a girl chased by hit-men from Algeria. They lead an unorthodox life, always on the run.
Alphaville
Chief Engineer (uncredited)
An American private-eye arrives in Alphaville, a futuristic city on another planet which is ruled by an evil scientist named Von Braun, who has outlawed love and self-expression.
Ophélia
A young man becomes enraged when his mother remarries his wealthy uncle after his father dies.
Le Petit Soldat
Laszlo
During the Algerian war for independence from France, a young Frenchman living in Geneva who belongs to a right-wing terrorist group and a young woman who belongs to a left-wing terrorist group meet and fall in love. Complications ensue when the man is suspected by the members of his terrorist group of being a double agent.
The Doll
An avant-garde political satire that takes place in a mythical country in South America. The dictator has been replaced by a look-alike revolutionary, and the dictator's wife has been replaced by a robot.
Vivre Sa Vie
Injured Man (uncredited)
Twelve episodic tales in the life of a Parisian woman and her slow descent into prostitution.
The Punishment
An aimless young woman is sent home from school with nothing to do. Drifting through the streets of Paris, she comes across a variety of people.
Katia
(uncredited)
Tsar Alexandre II meets a young student, Katia. He understands that he loves her and try to send her away but they end up seeing each other again and becomes his mistress. With the help of Katia, Alexandre prepares a liberal constitution, but these reforms make him hostile to the more privileged subjects without satirising the revolutionaries against the regime.
À double tour
Vlado
The mistress of the wealthy Henri Marcoux is murdered and the family accuses the milkman of committing the crime. But Marcoux's daughter's fiancé suspects that she may have been murdered by someone else.