Review: Márta Mészáros’s Feminist Parable Adoption on Criterion Blu-ray

The year 1975 has long been recognized as a crucial moment in feminist cinema due to the release of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, a monument of the avant-garde that, for all its other triumphs, is most notable for elevating the domestic life of a woman to an epic scale.

Similarly exacting in its scrutiny but less celebrated is Márta Mészáros’s Golden Bear-winning drama of the same year, Adoption, which also shares Jeanne Dielman’s fixation with domestic routine, labor, and the march of time. In the opening minutes, a loudly ticking clock awakens middle-aged Kata (Katalin Berek) in the dim bedroom of her rural home, occasioning a condensed study of morning tasks followed by a sequence of documentary-like observation at Kata’s place of work, a factory line devoted to woodworking.

Eschewing fixed-camera rigor, though, Mészáros’s aesthetic instead aims for an intimate identification with her characters. Shooting in richly detailed black and white in a gloomy winter landscape of spindly dead trees and fog-shrouded fields, the director uses insistent close-ups and fluid camera movement to bestow grace and empathy on the hardened faces that populate a Hungary still reeling from the twin traumas of World War II and Soviet rule.

Berek’s visage is a particularly unforgettable one; shadowed by long bangs and stress lines, her Kata is a walking embodiment of discontent. The stony expression she wears throughout is finally lightened by the hint of a smile halfway through the film, when her contentious relationship with Anna (Gyöngyvér Vigh), a girl from the nearby reform school, blossoms into a friendship with shades of both mother-daughter closeness and sisterly solidarity.

The growing bond between Kata and Anna forms the core of Adoption’s narrative, but for both women it is something peripheral to their greater yearnings. Isolated in her quiet home, Kata longs for the responsibility and companionship of a child, but when she suggests the idea to her married lover, Jóska (László Szabó), he’s unwilling to commit, all while the film’s gliding camera evokes the shifting tectonic plates of their relationship.

Anna, meanwhile, wants to marry her boyfriend, Sanyi (Péter Fried), but the protestations of her estranged family and the sexist denouncement of her character courtesy of the reform school’s headmasters make this a nearly untenable proposition. In navigating these hurdles, both women face uncaring instruments of stern bureaucracy, and in these barrages of legalese, captured in unflinching close-up, one can detect the seeds of more recent critiques of curdled post-Eastern Bloc state power by filmmakers like Béla Tarr and Corneliu Porumboiu.

For all its surface chill, though, Adoption emerges as a warm testament to feminine willpower, which isn’t to say that it’s idealistic or unduly celebratory. Late in the film, during a sozzled group waltz at Anna and Sanyi’s wedding shot with actual members of an orphanage, the film’s roving, zooming camera spies on a wordless altercation between the two lovers that all but guarantees future disputes, which we’ve been led to believe stand little chance of resolving in Anna’s favor. And in a hauntingly ambivalent final scene, the consummation of Kata’s titular procedure yields no immediate fireworks, and the freeze-frame that concludes the film leaves the distinct impression of a woman at a perilous crossroads.

Image/Sound

The soft gray light of rural Hungary is beautifully rendered on this dynamic transfer, with all gradations of the monochromatic spectrum accounted for. Given that so much of Adoption is shot in close-up, the new 4k digital restoration allows for piercing clarity in the tiniest nuances of each actor’s face. At times, dialogue has an echoing quality, as though given a slapback delay, though it’s hard to determine whether that’s a product of the original mix or the remaster. Otherwise, the delicate soundtrack is without blemishes, giving equal weight to both the softly spoken voices and György Kovács’s ethereal woodwind score.

Extras

For a director scantly represented on Region 1 home video, Criterion’s treatment of this Adoption Blu-ray is surprisingly robust, as though an attempt to compensate for Márta Mészáros’s lack of a reputation in the West. Scholar Catherine Portuges sets the stage with a thorough overview of the filmmaker’s career, contextualizing her work in an industry hostile to women directors and even more so to explicit critiques of prevailing political norms. Mészáros herself then looks back at the film in an interview filmed during a retrospective at the 2019 Berlinale, wherein she notes the profound influence that her then-husband Miklós Jancsó had on both her filmmaking vision and her sense of Hungarian history.

The centerpiece of the disc is an hour-long documentary, Márta Mészáros: Portrait of the Hungarian Filmmaker filmed by Katja Raganelli in 1979. The film works chronologically through Mészáros’s oeuvre, merging biographical details and critical insights with intimate interviews with the director herself. Along the way, treasures for the diligent Mészáros devotee include fly-on-the-wall footage of her at work directing Delphine Seyrig on the set of 1979’s On the Move, spry observations of street life in her beloved Budapest, and recollections of her relationship with Jancsó, who makes a brief appearance. Rounding out the disc is Mészáros’s 1964 short Blow-Ball, a gorgeously composed, impressionistic study of a neglected child living in Budapest; an original trailer for Adoption; and a superb essay by Elena Gorfinkel.

Overall

Criterion’s generous package for Márta Mészáros’s most well-known film, Adoption, teasingly peels back the curtain on a fascinating and underappreciated career. We can only hope for more Mészáros films to be given such lavish home video treatment.