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.

As austere as any Bresson, this film shows Meszaros' brilliance as a filmmaker. The story is simple, the acting understated and powerful, the black and white photography masterful, the atmosphere strained and grey. Without once mentioning politics, it could not be a more powerful indictment of Communist society.

It is, a sad comment on the state of film distribution in this day and age that the works of Meszaros, the most prolific woman filmmaker of all time, should be so little available. Come on, Amazon, get with it!

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.

Beautiful black and white cinematography full of close-ups and the depiction of faces, details and of factory workers. Good acting depicting a sudden relationshipt that arises and develops between an unmarried woman who wants a baby (and her married boyfriend does not) and a teenager who has been abandoned by her parents and wants to marry her boyfriend. By helping and listening the latter, the former understands better her own situation and makes decisive decisions. I am not entirely convinced about the development of any of these two characters, and the so much mentioned troubled life of the girl and the labour condition of the woman seem not to seriously influence their attitude along the story. Script perhaps does not show enough coherence (the slap being the most gratuitous moment, perhaps) despite the slow time dedicated to dialogues.