DOWN BY LOVE

This film is a story of a suicide commited in revenge.

Éva, 24, has been living on her own in a small flat inherited from her parents. The only sense of her limited life seems to be her secret love affair with Tibor, a married man of forty-three.

The film follows the events of the last week preceding the woman's death, while gradually revealing their disastrous affair and its antecedents.

Due to an accident Éva loses her parents as a young girl. Some friends of her family, Tibor and Klára adopt the kid to bring her up together with their own older sons. A few years later – Éva is thirteen at that time – Tibor seduces her to have sexual intercourse with the adolescent girl. Éva falls in love with her foster father and becomes both physically and mentally addicted to him. Having realized they are having an affair, Klára, the foster mother, sends the girl to a home in an effort to save what she can.However, Tibor will not give up his secret relationship with Éva. The growing girl is bound to him more and more under the spell of his personality as well as his promises.

Leaving the foster home, Éva moves to town, where she makes ends meet on the man's financial support and the money she makes as a drawer. Week after week, year after year she would be waiting for the very same two days: for Wednesdays and Saturdays which she can spend with her man who has already settled down to their secret double life.

Eleven years have passed like this. In Éva's life there is no place for anyone else but Tibor,there is no place for any other feeling but her passion for the man. Her sole contact with normal life is represented by Zsuzsa, her only friend whom she met in the foster home.However, Zsuzsa's effort to make the love-sick woman see reason is all in vain. Any other man is unimaginable for her. For Tibor does she live, in Tibor does she dwell.

There is just one single chance for her to establish contact with another man of her age, but the sudden blaze of passion soon proves to be abortive as Tibor, realizing the danger, makes a coquest of the young woman again. He declares that with his sons having grown up,he can fulfil his promise and leave Klára to start a new life with Éva.

No matter how it becomes more and more obvious that Tibor is just deluding her, Éva, blinded by love, considers it a token of love that he has got a neighbour watch every step of hers for a long time.

In order to hasten things, Éva decides to inform her foster mother, whom she has not seen for years, that Tibor is about to divorce her so she had better give him up.Her meeting with Klára,however, leaves her without hope: Klára, still young-looking, is at an advanced stage of pregnancy. Éva is forced to face the fact that Tibor has been fooling her continually. There is something even more serious she has to realize: even her own affection was nothing else but a desperate attempt to conceal from her own self the very fact that her life has been robbed, she has been deprived of her dignity and has not been loved but used.

She is left with one choice. To regain her dignity she decides to kill herself. But this suicide is also a fatal trap, schemed in cold blood and set for the man that she wants to take revenge on and ruin just as herself...

The film recounts its unconventional story in an unconventional way. The whole plot is set in the solitary woman's home, her being the only character to appear as a living person in the story. The others, including Tibor, the people next door and Zsuzsa, are only present with their voice when speaking to Éva either over the phone or from the other side of the front door.

Thus the story of long loneliless is presented by one single actress in 90 minutes, in a most stirring and original way.