Director: Ildikó Enyedi
Country: Hungary
Award: none
Movement: none
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? Dorothy Segda essays three roles in the Hungarian-made My 20th Century. The film begins with the birth of twin girls to a Budapest mother (Dorothy Segda) in 1880. Orphaned early on, the girls are forced to sell matches on the streets until both are adopted by two separate families. Flash forward to 1900: Having lost track of one another, the grown-up twins take separate compartments on the Orient Express. One of the girls (Segda again) has become the pampered mistress of a wealthy man; the other (Segda yet again) is a bomb-wielding anarchist. Director Ildiko Enyedi evidently intended My 20th Century as an allegorical statement concerning the status of women in the modern mechanical age. The experiences of the twins are interspersed with shots of Thomas Edison (Peter Andorai), whom we see at the beginning of the film perfecting his incandescent light bulb on the very day that the sisters are born. The more technological advances made by Edison, the more confused the twins become in establishing their own roles in an advancing civilization. Adroitly avoiding cut-and-dried symbolism, Ildiko Enyedi keeps the audience wondering what she's up to by including such surrealistic vignettes as a caged chimpanzee recounting the day of his capture!
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