The Two of Them [1977]

 The Two of Them is a bittersweet, tender and delicately layered tapestry on an unlikely and surprisingly deep female friendship. That they overcome seemingly irreconcilable differences – in behaviours, choices and experiences, shaped by their contrasting social classes – through the commonality of their womenhood, added layered feminist undertones to the film. In that respect – plot outlines, understated tonalities, and the heartfelt bond between an older and a younger woman bound by their shared desire to either retain or rediscover their individual identities – it reminded me a lot of Mészáros’ Adoption, and also Aparna Sen’s Paromitar Ek Din. Mária (Marina Vlady) is an elegant, serene, articulate middle-aged woman who runs a garment centre employing young women and single mothers, and is seemingly happily married even though fault lines are discernible given her smug husband’s disdain for her work that keeps her away from home. Juli (Lili Monori) is a young, striking, impulsive, fiercely independent woman in a tempestuous relationship with an alcoholic man (Jan Nowicki) who can’t stay off the bottle. The characterization of Juli – in the way she’s both trapped and liberated, and refuses to be a victim – was reminiscent of the namesake character in Mészáros’ magnificent previous film Nine Months; and Monori’s terrific turn here, too, had parallels to her ferocious and extraordinary performance there. Vlady was wonderful too in portraying Mária’s gradually implosive character arc. The luminously shot film, though tad erratic at times, balanced between melancholy and turbulence with an endearing but ardent feminist stance. As an aside, Kati Kovacs had a cameo as a pop singer, and Zsuzsa Czinkóczi – who’d appear later as the unforgettable protagonist in the extraordinary ‘Diary Trilogy’ – played Juli’s little distraught daughter.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Marta Meszaros

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Marital Drama

Language: Hungarian

Country: Hungary

Nine Months [1976]

 Sandwiched between the sombre palette of her Golden Bear winning Adoption and delicate tapestry of The Two of Them – both, incidentally, were centered around the evolving bond between an older and a younger woman  belonging to divergent social classes – Mészáros’ Nine Months stood out for its defiantly feminist posture. And yet, this was also achingly intimate, melancholic and bleakly beautiful, thus making this as much a stirring rallying cry as a heartbreaking portrayal of a passionate, increasingly bitter and ultimately doomed relationship. Juli (Lili Monori) is a striking, headstrong and fiercely independent working-class woman – with poignant undercurrents of emotional vulnerability – who’s drawn into an intense romance with her supervisor János (Jan Nowicki, who Mészáros would get married to post dissolution of her marriage to fellow Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Jancsó in 1973) soon after joining as a worker at a large factory that dominates the small industrial town where she lives. Their relationship, however, is complicated when he discovers that she’s a single mother with a kid from a prior relationship with a kindly university professor. That he’s a patriarchal, temperamental and possessive man who’s distrustful of Juli’s past, jealous of her son, angered by her refusal to let go of her financial self-reliance – viz. her job and distance learning diploma she’s pursuing – upon becoming pregnant, and secretive of her past to his family, gradually but inevitably take things to a tragic rapture despite the strong love she feels for him. Monori gave a nuanced, powerful and daring turn wherein her real and real pregnancies, quite astonishingly, coalesced at the film’s finale; the gray-blue, foggy, desolate and grungy visuals, in turn, exquisitely accentuated Mészáros’ bittersweet evocation of womanhood and motherhood.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Marta Meszaros

Genre: Drama/Marital Drama

Language: Hungarian

Country: Hungary

Don't Cry, Pretty Girls! [1970]

 Márta Mészáros didn’t just make a stunning volte face with her third film Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls! – vis-à-vis the form and texture of her remarkable first two features, The Girl and Binding Sentiments – it perhaps remains a fascinating oddity in her overall oeuvre too given her love for restrained, understated and emotionally delicate portrayals. Breezy, lively, freewheeling, boisterous and even anarchic in its tone and flavour, and made in the form of an absorbing long-form music video – in a way renascent of A Hard Day’s Night – it provided a lovely homage to Hungary’s then counterculture movement. But, be that as it may, the jaunty tone, rebellious spirit, free love and zeitgeist were delightfully complemented with archetypal elements of her filmography – working-class backgrounds, quietly defiant women protagonists grappling with their desires and dilemmas, political subtexts, deep pragmatism – thus making this a Mészáros work alright despite the fabulous stylistic flourishes. The film followed a group of hip youngsters who work at factories during the day and attend throbbing Beat music gigs once free. Central to this gang is a gentle-natured young guy (Márk Zala) and his shy, soft-spoken, striking fiancée (Jaroslava Schallerová) who’re engaged even if their relationship is tentative at best; things, however, become teasingly complicated – and funny too – when she starts getting attracted to a dashing, debonair cellist (Lajos Balázsovits). Their ménage à trois – with all its saucy, neurotic silliness – and the ensuing coming-of-age were juxtaposed with a series of intoxicating, irreverent, poetic folk and jazz-based songs performed by Hungarian bands of that era. The lovely B/W photography – filled with strikingly composed tableaux, soft close-ups, gently roving shots, etc. – made the movie all the more sensuous, intimate and affecting.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Marta Meszaros

Genre: Romantic Comedy/Musical

Language: Hungarian

Country: Hungary

Binding Sentiments [1969]

 In her magnificent second feature Binding Sentiments, Mészáros eloquently and evocatively expanded upon some of the themes she’d espoused in The Girl, and in the process emphatically established her singular voice as a politically conscious artist and defiant feminist. She subtly raised pointed existential inquiries into women’s agency by critiquing entrenched patriarchy around the social constructs of marriage, class and personal freedom. Edit (Mari Töröcsik) is a wealthy, attractive and emotionally reserved woman whose husband – a well-known economist who subsumed himself into the Party hierarchy – has just died. In a scenario like this, she’s expected to be grief-stricken and even hysterical for having lost a long-time husband and a man of high social stature. However, contrarily, she not only isn’t bogged down by despair, she even starts experiencing a rare sense of liberation because she’d been stuck in a loveless marriage – which she didn’t have the courage to escape from – to a self-centered man who she’d become indifferent to. And hence, now that she’s single again, she wishes to quit her bourgeois life, move out of her luxurious residence to somewhere smaller, and therefore finally start living. Her conservative son (Lajos Balázsovits), however, is obsessed with his dead father’s image, unwilling to accept his mother’s choice, and hence manipulates his girlfriend (Kati Kovács) – who’s looking for love and social acceptance – into forcing Edit into resigning to the status quo. The film’s tonal nuances, melancholy, thematic undercurrents and simmering edginess aside, it was striking in its restrained stylistic virtuosity – the gorgeous B/W photography, marvelously orchestrated slow tracking shots, lively jazz infusions alternating silent stretches, etc. And these were propelled by Töröcsik’s terrific turn and complementary characterizations of the two women.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Marta Meszaros

Genre: Drama/Existential Drama/Family Drama

Language: Hungarian

Country: Hungary

The Girl [1968]

 Márta Mészáros, best known for her extraordinary, semi-autobiographical Diary Films – viz. Diary for My Children, Diary for My Lovers, Diary for My Mother and Father – made a deceptively assured and psychologically astute feature debut with The Girl, after spending many years making docu shorts. Incidentally, this was possibly the first feature-length movie to have been directed by a woman in Hungary. She once quipped, “I tell banal, commonplace stories, and then in them the leads are women—I portray things from a woman's angle”; this proclivity for blending politics and feminism into understated, quietly told, personal stories was immediately discernible in this tale of a young, disaffected, conflicted working-class woman in an existential flux. Szõnyi (played by Hungarian pop star Kati Kovács) has grown up in an orphanage and works in a factory in Budapest. She regularly posts ads in order to find her biological parents, and hence when she gets a letter from the woman who’d given her up two decades back, she promptly travels to a small village in order to finally meet her. However, to her disappointment, her mother expresses dissatisfaction upon her arrival, and even refuses to acknowledge Szõnyi as her daughter – possibly for having conceived her out of wedlock – to her domineering husband and teenaged son. Two other chance encounters defined the film – a young guy who she briefly relents to after being cold to his constant overtures, and an aged gregarious man who claims to have known her parents but might not be truthful about his own identity. Kovács’ cool, detached and enigmatic turn made Szõnyi such an intriguing character, and was backed by sparkling B/W photography and a spattering of jazz music.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Marta Meszaros

Genre: Drama/Existential Drama

Language: Hungarian

Country: Hungary