Jancsi (András Bálint) and his engineering graduate friends embark on life after university with big plans. They get their first slap in the face when the company where they are hired puts them in different departments with different salaries. At first, they get along, sometimes they have a big idea that they start working on together, but then little by little the group falls apart: some become more and more entrenched in the hierarchy; some get married, and one of them gets leukaemia. Jancsi, for better or worse, flees into love and continues to search for his place.
Like his next two films, Father (1966) and Love Story (1970), István Szabó's debuting film is an autobiographically inspired personal story that tries to capture the quest, dreams and desires of his generation. Age of Illusions is one of the inescapable generational mood films of the Hungarian New Wave. It accurately captures the dilemmas that preoccupied Szabó and his contemporaries, but its questions about growing up, about overcoming desires and illusions are just as valid for a young person today.
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István Szabó is an Oscar- and Kossuth Prize-winning Hungarian filmmaker of European influence and stature. His film Mephisto won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
His work has been recognised with numerous national and international awards, including the Hungarian Master of Cinema Award, the Jubilee Prima Primissima and the Kossuth Prize, as well as the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival (Confidence, 1980) and the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film (Colonel Redl, 1986). In 1996 he was awarded the Joseph Pulitzer Memorial Prize for his work on the Hungarian Television series Centenary of Cinema. In 2013 he won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 10th Jameson CineFest and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn. In 2014, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the German Directors' Association.
His generation was most influenced by the spirit of the French New Wave, which is perhaps most evident in his first film Age of Illusions. Like Godard and Truffaut's early masterpieces, Szabo's films are not concerned with classical plot lines. The free-moving handheld camera brings the characters intimately close, capturing both their world-changing conversations and their banal quarrels, and this flickering style also captures the mood of youth. Looming in the background at the same time is the relationship to power, to the dominant ideology, which would later become a favourite theme of the director, best captured in the "Are you a communist? No, I'm an engineer" dialogue.
There are two kinds of directors, he once said, one who tells a story because he wants to make a film at any cost, and another who makes a film because he wants to tell a story at any cost. He puts himself in the latter category.