Imperfect and without the public play and acclaim of The Pianist, Gloomy Sunday is yet a less passive and more entertaining cinema experience. Based on a Nick Barkow book of the same English name, director/co-scriptwriter Rolf Schübel's Gloomy Sunday makes better sense translated literally from the German film original, Ein Lied von Liebe un Tod, A Walk with Love and Death.

Only incidentally and improbably does the 1935 Hungarian-composed international hit "Gloomy Sunday" belong here. (Most famously by Billie Holiday and Artie Shaw, the song has been covered innumerable times, with versions by Abbey Lincoln to Diamanda Galas, Etta Jones, Herbie Mann and Shelly Manne, Josh White, Stan Kenton, Hildegarde, Sinéad O'Connor, Marianne Faithfull, Paul Robeson, Paul Whiteman, Mel Torme, Sarah Vaughan, Ricky Nelson, Woody Herman, Billy Eckstine, Bjork, Carmen McRae and Elvis Costello with the Attractions, and more.) In the 'thirties the pop version reportedly was spectacularly related to five suicides --probably not the several hundred of the film, capped by New Yorkers' driving Studebakers into the Hudson, only their car Victrolas surfacing to float the spot.

Gloomy Sunday is an old-fashioned love-in-time-of-war melodrama such as one seldom sees anymore and which the film makes one lament. This is Budapest, with different theme music, but it belongs to the world of Casablanca and Vichy; equally, its love triangle may call up Truffaut's Renoirish First War Jules et Jim or the Americanized Willie and Phil. But this latest Second War ménage stands on its own, through some may carp that, set in the present and surrounding the principal 1930s and '40s episodes, the opening-closing frame and its mystery and delayed revenge is a weakness.

With much to-do and entourage, the wealthy respected Herr Ambassador (Rolf Becker) enters a restaurant in Hungary's capital to celebrate his eightieth birthday. Cursorily asking after its long-dead owner Szabó, he requests a particular piece of music, notices a framed photograph of a woman, and drops dead, his heart "stopped." Just as abruptly, it is the mid-'thirties, where Szabó (Joachim Król) and his luscious love Ilona (Erika Marozsán) are auditioning piano players for the restaurant. Poorly dressed András (Stefano Dionisi) arrives too late, but his sensual looks and playing intrigue the lady, who convinces her boss and lover to hire the latecomer, who will prove a sensation.

Among many smitten clients is awkward Berlin businessman Herr Wieck (Ben Becker), who proposes to the woman. Rebuffed with kindly laughter, he plunges from a Danube bridge, only to be pulled out by Szabó. Ilona meanwhile falling into bed with András, rescuer and rescued drink and pledge mutual support.

Joyously sensual, not in any way prurient but with a hint of sad whimsy, the first half of the film follows the friendly ménage of Ilona's sharing bathtubs, beds and business with her two Budapesters. The men are more or less happy rivals but companions, and the selfless owner even negotiates a favorable record contract for "Gloomy Sunday," an as yet wordless song András composes for Ilona's birthday. An international success, the music nevertheless is unaccountably linked to a rash of suicides.

He serves pork in the restaurant and never closes even for the Sabbath, but Szabó is a Jew because his parents were, just as "if they had been Iroquois I'd be Iroquois." What is almost a Part Two begins with a Hitler newsreel that initially seems a black-and-white shift in the film. The Nazis overrun Hungary, and with them comes married SS Colonel Wieck. Still lusting after the woman who once rejected him, he dismisses a companion's Final Solution obsession and instead profiteers, peddling influence to spare Jewish lives in return for enormous sums.

A marvelously alive riverbank scene where Ilona spreads her arms in embrace of her two lovers and friends, fades into the horrors of love and venality in the Holocaust. The vial of poison that András secures with which to "stop the heart," will ironically survive, but people will not. When enough has hit the fan or landed on one's head, dignity cannot coexist with life and must lie in the act of choosing one's death.

The closing present-day frame is not without irony -- Wieck's heroic saving of Hebrew lives -- and, though some criticized its aptness, does provide the closure of poetic, if unrealistic, justice. 

(Released by Arrow Releasing, Inc.; not rated by MPAA.)