star-crossed lovers.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
In Márta Mészáros’s (”Adoption”) perceptive
romantic drama about star-crossed lovers, the brilliant female director
reflects on the country’s older generation with displeasure. The film is
set in the 1970s, and is a bitter indictment of Hungarian society and its
cold feelings. The direction stays locked in the ’social realism’ format
to both its benefit and detriment, as the dramatic situation verges on
cliché.
Márta is married to renown Hungarian film director Miklós
Jancsó.
Katra (Kutvölgvi) is an attractive young woman who works in
a factory and has just busted up with her abusive boyfriend. She attends
with her girlfriends a local college dance and meets a young college student
Molnár (Nagy) from a solid middle-class family, and they soon become
romantically involved. She lies telling him she is also a college student,
as she feels inferior and knows his bourgeois parents wouldn’t accept her.
It’s learned that she was raised in a state run orphanage after her parents’
bitter divorce, and had learned at an early age to fend for herself in
life. To carry out her lie, she talks her father into bringing his new
wife with him and pretend to her boyfriend’s folks that they are a well-to-do
family and she is a university student. It doesn’t work — her lie is detected
by the boy’s snippy mother, who tells the girl she is vulgar and won’t
be happy in marrying her son. Heartbroken, she breaks down and cries as
the film concludes with her taking a shower, ridding herself of the factory
grime.