Kalman's Day

45-year-old Kálmán lies on a couch dead tired as his wife Olga gets a phone call from her sister Zita. Zita and her husband Levente must get their children to a new progressive school opening in Olga’s neighborhood and to do that, they must borrow Olga and Kálmán’s address. Kálmán refuses because he thinks that children should learn how to cope with misery early on whereas helpful Olga wonders that it would be good to take the easy route whenever possible. When Zita and Levente arrive to spend Kálmán’s name day with an unspoken agenda to get the couple’s address information for the school application, silenced conflicts escalate and seemingly burnt-out marriages are tested while glasses of palinka go down one after another. How do we come to terms with the fact that most of our lives are at least seemingly terrible? Kalman’s Day ventures bravely into the territory of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and finds empathy from characters that at first come across as unbearably shallow.

Valtteri Lepistö