Tough and hard indeed, but also tender. Anna and Kata are both foundlings of a sort. They waver at the borders of social legibility, determined, eccentric personae who have no proper place within the stagnant institutions of a largely patriarchal Hungarian society. Women characters like these, and their relationships to one another, were unorthodox and scarcely seen in Hungarian films of the time, even as this small nation’s own cinematic New Wave moved into a period of efflorescence in the sixties, with the liberalization and thaw in old Stalinist-era restrictions, dubbed “Goulash Communism,” brought on by the leadership of János Kádár. The rigor and aesthetic daring of Mészáros’s cinema, along with that of her then better-known contemporaries Miklós Jancsó—Mészáros’s husband from 1960 to 1973—István Szabó, and Károly Makk, began to gain notice at international film festivals. Contrasting her work with her former husband’s allegorical formalism, Mészáros observed in 1984 that whereas Jancsó depicted the “historical machinery whose cogs entrap men,” she was instead interested in “human beings and how they individually shape history.” Iconoclasm and individual willfulness were vital values for Mészáros’s cinematic vision.

Adoption was a critical turning point in Mészáros’s career and her moment of global recognition as a formidable auteur. In Hungary, her earlier films—which doggedly explored young working women’s predicaments and subjectivities—were tolerated but largely disapproved of by the state and disdained by Hungarian viewers. Mészáros has recounted that observers on her sets would condescendingly reassure her that she needn’t worry herself too much about the film shoot, as Jancsó would soon arrive to “help her.” Adoption was the first Hungarian film entered into the award competition at the Berlin Film Festival, in 1975, and Mészáros became the first woman filmmaker in its history to win the Golden Bear. The film’s meteoric success led to wide international distribution of her subsequent work—including international coproductions and collaborations with actors such as Anna Karina and Isabelle Huppert—and renown as one of the most recognizable figures of Hungarian cinema abroad.

An emerging attention to women’s filmmaking among new feminist film festivals, collectives, and film journals in the midseventies was a galvanizing force in the circulation and promotion of Mészáros’s work, along with the films of her contemporaries Agnès Varda, Věra Chytilová, Lina Wertmüller, and Larisa Shepitko. But even as her films persistently foregrounded resolute and autonomous women, Mészáros bristled at being identified as a feminist. Her ambivalent attitude must be seen as a skepticism shared by many women from the Eastern Bloc, who saw feminism as a Western conception and experienced in state socialism’s false promises of gender equality the continuation of a double standard, in demanding women’s labor in the workplace and public spheres yet the maintenance of the status quo in the reproductive and domestic ones. As Mészáros explained to Portuges, “Women have been enslaved to serve both the factory and the family at once.”

In her obsession with “lonely women, abandoned children,” surrogate parents, and women adrift who find harbor in the company of other women, Mészáros admitted to Hoberman that “I think I have always made this one film.” One of her early documentaries, Szeretet (Care and Affection, 1963), concerns the stewardship of children in a state orphanage, and has an extended sequence that foretells the filmmaker’s continued reliance on narratives of children’s abandonment, the question of what debts are owed to those who have “no shelter, no law” (to invoke the kindred spirit of Varda’s Sans toit ni loi, or Vagabond), and the force of the face as a specifically cinematic entreaty. A series of children’s faces are held in close-up, unselfconsciously regarding the camera, in a one-minute montage. Mészáros then cuts abruptly to a wall of case files, shelved in a grid, an inanimate, corrugated surface that contrasts with the rounded softness of the waifs’ cheeks and glassy eyes. The shock of the cut emphasizes the rupture between the children’s thrumming lived presence and their institutional metrification into units of data, compressed into a spurious, abstracted anonymity.

In Adoption, the orphanage is again figured as a socially invisible, suppressed sphere, a prison of suspended aspirations. The guileless young faces that stare at Kata echo those of the documentary, asserting the obduracy of their experience. Their direct, arrested expressions gong like bells, attuning us to Kata’s growing sensitivity. The implacability of these wastrel gazes, as they stare up from metal bunks or peek out from behind drab painted doorways, route Kata’s maternal yearning toward another model of nurturance, beyond the injunction of the biological. The potential of another path emerges alongside Kata’s recognition that, hypothetically, Anna “could be my daughter,” a statement that also serves as an invitation. Anna, without pause, replies, “I’ve had enough of parents.”

What stuns most of all in Adoption is its anchorage in these tremulous, unforgettable faces: fatigued, plaintive, defiant. Mészáros noted to Hoberman that, in her films, “my people are larger than life. My films are stylized . . . They are like westerns.” One cannot help but think that this statement refers as much to the scaling of the image in extreme close-ups as it does to the grandiloquence of genres that magnify emotion. Mészáros captures the magnitude of characters’ faces in the flux of their moods and in the thickness of their longings. The eminent Hungarian film theorist and screenwriter Béla Balázs gave stirring tribute to the close-up in 1924, asserting it as one of cinema’s paramount features. For Balázs, the facial close-up’s alchemical enchantment lies in how it can capture “the rhythm of our inner turbulence,” how “every wrinkle becomes a crucial element of character and every twitch of a muscle testifies to a pathos that signals great inner events.” Katalin Berek’s astonishing performance bears deliverance to these proclamations of transportive physiognomy, as the subtle changes in her expression, her soft, limpid eyes and expressive weariness, signal oceanic tides and tectonic revolutions of drifting feeling. With Berek’s granular precision, Kata’s brittle bearing conceals a tenacity of spirit, a pugnacious iconoclasm punctured by unexpected vulnerability. Gyöngyvér Vígh, as Anna, bestows the film with a performance to rival the great vagabond spirits of the modern cinema, a disposition between steely resignation and smudged optimism. One of the most moving scenes in the film shows Anna in a pub observing Kata, sitting at another table, as Jóska stands her up. Across a cut, Kata’s mien shifts from buoyant anticipation to despondency, as her eyes flutter and well up in wincing realization of her lover’s desertion. Anna, unable to countenance Kata’s pain, hovers near and comforts her, kissing her head and wiping away her tears in a cautious embrace, as their faces share the frame. “You should leave him,” the teen announces. They decamp to another restaurant for a sublimely ordinary dinner of pickled beets, fried liver, and cognac. Leering men swarm around the women’s space, the intricate erotics of their friendship made insolently public. Mészáros and the spectator side with the women’s autonomous island of pleasure, luxuriating in the palpability of their private solidarity and self-replenishment. It is the closest Mészáros comes to positing a melancholic utopia of these two women’s mutual sufficiency, unrestrained by regulations of filial propriety or erotic object choice. 

Mészáros has suggested that her style does not tend toward the sureties of realism or naturalism: “I prefer a kind of ‘pseudo-realism’ which is only superficially realistic: in fact, I abstract a lot.” Her attentively intimate style depends on this thrust of abstraction, as she breaches space and time through a haptic proximity to her performers. In the opening sequences, Mészáros cuts fluidly from Kata’s banal domestic gestures, as she draws open the curtain and lights her stove, to arresting images of her torso drenched in water under a streaming shower, to shots of her hands in the entrained habits of the woodworking plant, and then to her neck and back at close range being palpated and probed by a doctor’s hands. These extreme close-ups flow like a slipstream that produces a continuity across Kata’s body’s sensate surface, bridging her lived duration, and the labors that punctuate it, across home, work, and medical spheres.

Such abstraction also takes the form of a style of shooting (abetted by cinematographer Lajos Koltai, who would go on to work with Szabó) that yokes the extreme close-ups with a fluidly roaming camera, one that fleetly oscillates around the scene. Instead of separation or alienation at the level of the image, wherein the close-up remains contained, or exalted, Mészáros sensually places the face into a dialogical relay of visages that enchain their shared time and space. Nowhere is this technique more brilliantly pronounced than in the scene of the wedding celebration of the young Sanyi and Anna, as a traveling shot moves in extreme close-up across a panoramic assembly of faces: Anna’s juvenile-home friends, Sanyi’s family members, and various acquaintances, registering a parade of affects. A few of Anna’s compatriots sob uncontrollably, lamenting the disparity between her good fortune and their own precarious destinies. The perceptible chain of the camera’s motion itself invites the relational work of correspondence, equivalence, rupture. Such an emotionally saturated, polysemous device describes a social plenum reduced neither to individual solitude nor to collective ecstasy. Mészáros’s eye holds in balance the tensions and tetherings of these marooned souls, who gravitate to one another, in camaraderie, attraction, and ambivalence.

The film’s ending, its cold comfort, hints at a vaster desolation. The wedding scene ends in a moment of Sanyi’s averted violence toward his bride; Kata’s quest for a way toward motherhood materializes as a new reality, as she signs adoption papers and is handed a rotund infant girl. Clutching the child, she runs to catch a bus in long shot, as we hear her ragged breathing. The frame freezes, the image of Kata rushing suspended, the action incomplete. Such formal irresolution evokes all that remains uncertain, beyond the promise of a granted wish. What should a mother be? One could say, drawing on the lessons of Kata and Anna: kindredness more than kin.