MOVIE REVIEW – Another Hungarian film, another Hungarian light summer comedy – but this time it’s not a romcom, but another popular genre: a buddy movie for little kids. Gábor Rohonyi and Csaba Vékes’s “Szia, Életem!” tells the story of a cynical, philandering, but eternally single, down-and-out Hungarian writer (there are a couple of them…) who is suddenly saddled with a child by one of his exes.

“There’s no getting off the love train”, Ferenc Demjén once sang, and the same could be said of light summer comedies with traces of romance in or close to the over-represented romcom. Although “romance” plays less of a role in “Hello, My Life” (it does…), we are back on familiar ground: a popular theme in American and European (especially French) comedies is when a bon vivant, womanizing, perpetually single father is suddenly forced to spend several days with his child. That’s what this Hungarian film is about.

Celebrity writer, personal crisis

Of course, the protagonists of these comedies are usually charming or at least good-looking Hollywood stars. Still, closer to our Hungarian reality, the main character Barna (Szabolcs Thuróczy) is a battered, heavily balding, not very good looking and recently not a very successful writer who somehow manages to get women. This is perhaps the less realistic part of the film (his ex-wife, from whom he has a child, was supposedly head over heels in love with him, but he has a brief time with the ladies anyway), but it is all the more real how financially broke our hero is. Our hero has rent and other debts, his contract is about to be terminated, and he’s being thoroughly ripped off by the taxi driver with whom he’s had a row.

The eternal bachelor Barna never wanted children in his life, but now he is forced to act like a father. But that’s not all: the real problems (and the main story of the film itself) begin when our hero’s former partner (Ilona Nagy) suddenly appears at the door and forces their six-year-old child, Samu (Mór Pásztor-Várady), on Barna to look after him. At the same time, she goes on a ten-day scholarship to Japan.

We’ve seen it before

So the basic concept is familiar, and although the film starts strong with the taxi driver ‘romance’, as the child enters the picture, we are now presented with the usual clichés. The child is a constant problem in Barna’s life; for a six-year-old, he is always pissing his pants because it is written in the script and is also terribly annoying. Since this was the intention, the child actor Mór Pásztor-Várady plays the pesky little guy well, but as a viewer, I started to get fed up with the kid after a while.

All in all, though, the father-child movie comedy is pretty much routine – until the film starts to force the “fantasy”, fairy tale parts where the father tells him stories, and the film repeatedly displays this. At first, these technically reminiscent of the costume fairy tales of the eighties (read: technically terribly shoddy) fairy tale sequences might be funny, but when they were forced into the film for the umpteenth time, and even trying to force profound messages into it, I seriously considered walking out of the auditorium.

Watchable Hungarian parent-child comedy

Hi, My Life! is a relatively fair Hungarian family comedy film, with better humour at first and more and more forced humour. Szabolcs Thuróczy does a good job as the burnt-out, down-and-out celebrity judge and eternal bachelor, although it is hard to believe that he is a “womanizer” at the time, as he wrote the character in the script. The unrealistic parent-child farce elements are handled relatively well, but the “test fantasy” parts (“fairy tales”) should not have been forced.

-BadSector-