Marta Meszaros, Adoption (1975)

In Marta Meszaros’s Adoption (1975), there is one sequence, more specifically one shot, which for me condenses the entire film and collapses the world of Kata. The scene comes late in the film, just before the final few moments when we see Kata sign adoption papers and walk off with her new-found child, full of hopes for and perhaps uncertainties about the future. It is a shot that thematically comments on more than just the situation at hand. It is a shot of Anna, presumably on her wedding day, alone in the corner, staring out toward us with her dark, haunting eyes. It is the perfect example of how dreams can collapse in an instant and it comments on the need for a woman to stand alone sometimes in order to (ironically) live a fuller life.

Meszaros is a director interested in relationships among women and the expectations and plights of ordinary women. She was no stranger to gender inequality, attending film school in Moscow because it was “not easy for a woman” to attend film school in Hungary. According to the interview conducted by Andrew James Horton, Meszaros began her career hated by Hungarian officials for directly confronting problems under Communism through her documentary on the lives of poor Hungarians. Meszaros herself commented on her early work by saying: “The officials hated my film because it was about life under Communism, showing how it really was. But it was the truth—I captured the ordinary lives of these people and their problems. I did it many times.”

There is something brutally honest in her work, as literature about her suggests, that is openly displayed in Adoption with its critique on social understandings of familial relationships and women’s ability to have control over their daily lives. As the film begins, an immediate sense of isolation is felt. There is only a loud buzzing of an alarm and a solitary female figure preparing for work. There is music, but no dialogue; Kata is alone, as are all the women in the factory, working together, yet each at their own isolated task. A few shots later, Kata’s pulsating heart is heard as she waits for her doctor to finish a medical exam; as she waits to hear whether or not her health is good enough to have a child at the difficult mothering age of 43. Once cleared the only source of difficulty for Kata is that the man she loves (Joska) is married and will not agree to let her have his child because the child would not have a father. As they continue to talk about the issue, Joska tells Kata that, “if it hadn’t been for you, I couldn’t have managed,” as he has recently been through some tough times with his family. To him, Kata is expected to be strong and a source of reassurance and security. In another scene, he runs to her for comfort, or perhaps to get away from pressures he faces at home. Yet, there is the sense that Kata is not supposed to expect the same support from him. He will not agree to let her have his child, even if she will raise the child alone, and he alone dictates when and where they will meet. It is almost as if Kata simply accepts this as her fate, not expecting equality in her love life and resigning herself to the fact that it is her lot to never experience being a mother until she becomes involved with the young Anna who blatantly points out the emotionally repressive aspects of the relationship. “This isn’t right. You meet when he wants to; when he’s got the time. You ought to leave him”, Anna tells Kata in a memorable scene of the two women bonding over drinks and denying the men glancing their way dances in favor of establishing a strong womanly bond where each is able to be herself and assert herself totally.

Anna gives Kata someone to live for; a taste of motherhood and responsibility for someone who loves her back. Moreover, Kata works to bring Anna to what she thinks will be her happiness in marriage. All does not end as a fairytale, however, on a positive note. This brings me back to the scene I opened my discussion with. It hits the viewer like a personal violent blow when a quarrel begins during Anna’s wedding celebration and she is shoved by her new husband into a corner as he angrily walks away from her. The fairytale has come true for her, and yet she is alone. The wedding celebration scene in general is full of drama and heightened emotion. The women depicted in it all seem to be lonely, dreaming of the fairytale and crying either tears of joy for Anna or of pity for their own conditions as women before the scene of Anna alone. Anna is still trapped, and perhaps the message here is that often women must stand alone to achieve what they most desire.

If Anna’s fate is read in the light of trading means of entrapment and is generally indicative of the larger fate of many women who search to fulfill themselves in relation to men, Kata’s final action seems somewhat problematic in that she seems to abandon Anna even as she finally realizes her dream of motherhood. Perhaps Meszaros’s motive is to show her audience that women must find their own paths, not that they must necessarily be alone or isolated, but that the relationships they establish must be balanced in dynamics of power and security in order for all involved to be most productive and emotionally stable. Even this observation is also somewhat problematic because Kata does not really find her own path, but she also does not rely on a man to dictate it for her either. Rather, in relation to Anna, she is able to realize that she will become a successful single mother. Yet Anna, the apparently strongest woman, perhaps the representative of a new generation of womanhood in her power to assert herself and to build a strong relationship with her would be husband while guiding Kata in her process of higher self-realization, is left in the most ambiguous and isolated position at the film’s close. Perhaps this is because women continue to struggle with gender issues or perhaps because Anna’s society would not be comfortable with her complete victory without submission to men since acknowledging such a reality would contribute to the film’s overall honesty and Meszaros’s dedication to commenting truthfully on the society she sees and experiences; examining dynamics of women’s lives. Much of this is speculation, but there is undoubtedly a “feminist” yet slight counter-feminist aesthetic at work here.