Casablanca

The first time I heard about Casablanca was in 2004, when Sziget festival used the line „This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” as a slogan, and achieved a great success. Interestingly, none of my classmates knew where it came from, so I turned to my ultimate source of information, my Mom. (back then we didn’t have internet access at home). Next I met some allusions to it in the Serbian indie-movie, “Black cat, white cat”, and decided to watch the original one. Since then, I made a good acquaintance with the film, and know not only one line from it. (I also know “Look at you, kid”, and that in the original screenplay there was only “look at you”, and Humphrey Bogart added “kid”, which gave an absolutely new feature to the relationship between Ilsa and Rick.)

The film became a cult-movie, and beside the awesome acting of Bogart and Bergman, I can’t really figure out why. Naturally it has an anti-war atmosphere, and a good love story with self-sacrificing and action, but still, there is something more behind the plot.

The love triangle of Ilsa, Rick and Lazlo seems to be the main motif, but without some supporting character the film wouldn’t have been of the same success. The key supporting character is lieutenant Louis Renault, a comic figure who moves between the German commander representing power, and Rick, whom he like and share interests with. An other is Sam, who brings black music to Rick’s bar being an attraction, and brings old memories to Ilsa and Rick – he, like the song “Time goes by” is a particle of the summer in Paris and the lost love.
I’d like to mention that the Hungarian dubbing is great, which cannot be told in the case of every contemporary film. 

All in all it is a good film, I liked it.