Takò is a little boy whose father, a doctor, survives the war only to die of a heart attack soon after. As Hungary delves into the reconstruction, Takò spends his childhood building a father out of dimly cast memories and cast-of-thousand fantasies: Father was a partisan in a trenchcoat escaping Nazis on motorcycles, a famous surgeon, an unassuming hero who hid ghetto Jews in the hospital ward. These contrivances sustain Takò into young adulthood and the chaos of university life in 1956, when young people measure their authenticity against the compromised humanity of the fathers. Szabo's second film, Father is a picture of a generation drawn in quick, lyric strokes and dry wit that today reminds us of no one so much as Woody Allen. And as in Allen, the highest crime is being merely human as we reconstruct the past with pitiless love.