My Way Home deals with very much the same themes as The Red and the White and The Round UP except here we have hope and an example of a way out.

All of the films deal with the randomness of violence. War does not pick out people because they deserve to live or die. And authority is not tempered with justice. It is arbitrary. Even your own country men are a danger in this world.

The landscape, bare plains in all directions, as far as the eye can see captures the hopelessness of trying to escape. There is nowhere to hide. You are like a leaf caught in a wind that blows you one way or another. The point is made with a beautiful homage to North by Northwest (1959) when a plain chases the boys in the naked landscape, while they try to catch up with a naked woman, who is probably running away from rapists. It is telling that we never find out where she came from or what became of her. She is like one of those leaves being blown around by the winds of war.

So all these films capture the evil of war, and how inhuman and cold it is (no wonder Kubrick loved Miklós Jancsó). This film however does show us how the world could be. A friendship of a Hungarian and Russian boy is formed when the Russian boy saves the Hungarian one from a minefield. They take care of each other (even though they don't speak each other language) and form a friendship and love that is stronger than anything he receives from his own country men.

And let's us not forget that this film was made during the Cold War, when nations refused to see each other as human and threatened each other with weapons of mass destruction. Into that world comes this beautiful cry for peace, love and understanding.

This film has been described as Jansco's first masterpiece. I would probably agree. The story concerns a 17yr old hungarian stranded in Russia at the end of the second world war, adrift after the collapse of the German army. He speaks a few words of German and no Russian. He seemingly feels nothing, and the film gives no easy explanations why. Like every other character in a Jansco film he seems completely overwhelmed by the scale of the landscape who finds himself wandering in almost antlike, almost always lost at the rear of a longshot. We never learn how close he is to hungary.

Eventually the film becomes a vivid and psychologically telling depiction of male friendship. In 1967 a story of friendship between a Russian and a hungarian after WW2 is an incredibly political subject,yet Jansco affects a kind of delightful innocence in this section and never lets his symbolism overwhelm his characters. What could have been over-reaching and didactic emerges as more of a chamber piece. I don't know how Jansco ever got away with making these kinds of movies in a soviet country.

My only caveat is that Jansco's most significant theme, political violence and its random nature, is partly explored in this film but in a way completely superficial and unaffecting compared to the terrible catharsis of films like "The round up" and "the red and the white".

Overall, a gem