A Hungarian boy whose father dies at the end of World War II builds up a heroic fantasy, in which he is the son of a brave partisan who rose to heights of glory during the war. The myth sustains him into young adulthood, enabling him even to impress girls with stories of his father's feats, until 1956 when, embroiled in the Hungarian uprising, he becomes less and less in need of his father's image. In love with a Jewish girl who teaches him about the realities of her recent history and heritage, he begins to face the realities of his own. His father, to no one's surprise, was a quite ordinary man.
Lóránt Czigány comments: “The older intellectuals (in Hungary) no longer look back on the Fifties with anger. The traumatic experience is mellowed by the passing of time. It is rather a feeling of guilt towards the younger generation.... (But) the sins of the fathers were seen by the sons - the teenagers of the Fifties. Their father image was badly shaken; they disowned their fathers. The pathetic search for a substitute that could be idolized is brilliantly portrayed in Szabó's Father.”
“Szabó is especially good in his brief, sketch-like notations, either real or imagined, in which the boy recalls or constructs his father's past. This is real, solid, moving yet unsentimental stuff, and it's beautifully illustrated as well by Sandor Sara's camerawork, with its nostalgic glimpses of the past. (Father) avoids no issues, thorny or not, and its integration of the 1956 Hungarian uprising is apt and honest, as are such other topics as early befuddlement with Marxism or the problems of a Jewish minority in Budapest.” --Variety