Adoption

Based on the first 30 min, which was all I could take, this film, consisting mostly of chain smoking Hungarians earnestly and humorlessly conversing about motherhood and adoption, seems designed to repel viewers. C minus.

Marta Meszaros was born in 1931 and still making films having made about thirty and shorts and TV also previously married to Miklos Jancso. Mostly known for Diary For My Children (1984) and recently Aurora Borealis: Northern Light (2017) and Adoption made earlier with an award at Berlin. The film is rather sad with the woman in her 40s and really wanting to have a baby but her lover not happy as he already has a wife and children. A young dysfunctional girl, she thinks, it might be an idea, although it is rather silly and it becomes complicated she is already unhappy with her life and her parents. The end is very sudden as she runs for a bus, although it doesn't look like being a good outcome. Nevertheless I thought it was well done and especially of the young girl and the older woman, and of course everyone at the wedding.

A single woman turned 40 wants a baby but has nobody to give her one. Her instincts displaced, she befriends a tearaway girl from a young offender's institution. The two women, each at a watershed in their lives, draw something from each other without being able to relate to each other properly.

It has an ungainly, unstructured feel to it – more sentiment than substance - like a day imperfectly remembered, which amounts to a startling, artless realism. The smudgy black and white Hungarian landscape and sparse dialogue are forefunners of Tarr's, and there are some nicely observed characters. Women will connect with Meszaros' worldview: life as a forlorn struggle to be as benign as one might want to be, but inevitably held back by the sheer dourness of the world. So we make do with what we have and hope that things occasionally work out, as they do here. Winner of the Golden Bear.

One of the great films about women made by a woman, Marta Meszaros' "Adoption" is about the most fundamental need of many women, to be a mother. Kata is a 43 year old widow, living alone but having an affair with a married man who is not prepared to leave his wife. One day she asks him to father a child with her, which she will raise alone, but he refuses. Then she meets Anna, a young girl from the local boarding school, who asks Kata if she can use her house to meet her boyfriend. A friendship develops between them that might lead to all their problems being solved.

Meszaros shoots her film mostly in close-ups as if by focusing on these faces we are also getting inside their heads. It's an unusual treatment of an unusual subject, one that in an American film would have been sentimentalised out of all proportion. As Kata, Katalin Berek is extraordinarily good and the director, one-time wife of Miklos Jansco, never deviates from the intensity of her subject, making this a deeply moving film. Not much seen these days, this remains a key film of the seventies.

1st watched 7/10/2009 – 4 out of 10 (Dir-Marta Meszaros): Interesting but unsatisfying drama about a middle-aged woman wanting a child but unable to get one in her current situation. She is no longer married and her lover is married to another woman and doesn't want to have one with her. She's medically able and she longs for this. She befriends an orphan from an institution and looks into taking her in as a daughter but this never works out. The movie is about the woman's longing and the routes she has to go to fulfill this. The young girl really just encourages her feelings but the logistics don't make her addition possible. The story is very slow moving and the characters really aren't that appealing. I usually like European movies and their focus on the real drama but this reality isn't that exciting or interesting. It is also very hard to read the main character and she is played very stoicly through most of the movie. Good things happen in the movie, but it's hard to tell the way the movie is directed. Feelings seem to get lost in the ho-hum mix and that's where the movie fails, in my opinion.