1115 Adoption

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headacheboy
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 8:57 pm

1115 Adoption

#1 Post by headacheboy » Wed Sep 30, 2020 7:42 pm

Adoption

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Trailblazing auteur Márta Mészáros gives aching expression to the experiences of women in 1970s Hungary in this sensitive and absorbing drama, which became the first film directed by a woman to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Through intimate camera work, Adoption immerses the viewer in the worlds of two women, each searching for fulfillment: Kata (Katalin Berek), a middle-aged factory worker who wants to have a child with her married lover, and Anna (Gyöngyvér Vígh), a teenage ward of the state determined to emancipate herself in order to marry her boyfriend. The bond that forms between the two speaks quietly but powerfully to the social and political forces that shape women's lives, as each navigates the realities of love, marriage, and motherhood in her quest for self-determination.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration undertaken by the National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive, supervised by cinematographer Lajos Koltai and approved by director Márta Mészáros, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New video essay by scholar Catherine Portuges
• Interview with Mészáros from 2019
Blow-Ball, a 1964 short film by Mészáros
Márta Mészáros: Portrait of the Hungarian Filmmaker, a 1979 documentary by Katja Raganelli featuring on-set interviews with the director and creative collaborators
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Elena Gorfinkel

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Ribs
Joined: Fri Jun 13, 2014 1:14 pm

Re: Criterion Discussion and Random Speculation Volume 7

#2 Post by Ribs » Thu Nov 26, 2020 11:49 pm

headacheboy wrote:
Wed Sep 30, 2020 7:42 pm
The 1975 Hungarian film Örökbefogadás (Adoption), directed by Márta Mészáros and previously through Kino, showed up last night on TCM with a Janus Films opening. It was also a new restoration. (I failed to write down who did said restoration.) I checked Janus Films website and found nothing regarding the film.
It would be nice for Criterion to finally release something from Hungary if they're happy to let Kino grab the Jancsos.


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swo17
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Re: 1115 Adoption

#4 Post by swo17 » Wed Dec 15, 2021 2:28 pm


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Drucker
Your Future our Drucker
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Re: 1115 Adoption

#5 Post by Drucker » Sun Jan 23, 2022 9:00 pm

Caught this at Lincoln Center today and really enjoyed it. I loved the compositions and heightened close-ups that framed the early scenes. I also really loved the incredibly sympathetic portrayal of a woman on the precipice of middle age with her fair share of regret. I couldn't help but think of the meme people share with pictures of dogs: "Who rescued who?" and I thought the film sort of illustrated that idea at times, while also maintaining a ton of ambiguity and giving neither the characters nor the audience easy answers.

I rarely catch new Janus restorations in theaters, preferring to buy Criterions. This film is extraordinarily grainy and in one of the earliest scenes there is some heavy machinery that works, and the sound is overwhelming for a moment.

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FrauBlucher
Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2013 8:28 pm
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Re: 1115 Adoption

#6 Post by FrauBlucher » Wed Feb 23, 2022 3:07 pm

Beaver

Out of curiosity, how is the Second Run region free and Criterion Region A?

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: 1115 Adoption

#7 Post by knives » Wed Feb 23, 2022 3:32 pm

Criterion usually defaults and so this was probably not a contractual choice.

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: 1115 Adoption

#8 Post by zedz » Wed Feb 23, 2022 5:36 pm

Meszaros doesn't seem to have a filmmaker thread, so this might be the best place to post this. I've been catching up with some of her early features recently, so here are some capsule reviews:

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The Sun Has Gone (1968) - Also known by the dreary title The Girl, this is a sharp, stylish study of a young woman seeking out the mother who abandoned her, turning up on her doorstep after being kind of invited and kind of uninvited. The modern city girl is a bad fit for the traditional village, and the reunion doesn't go the way she hopes - without descending into any kind of hysterics or melodrama. The compelling thing about the main character, Erszi, is that she's extremely willful and unswayed by familial and societal expectations, and after a great title sequence that's composed of nouvelle vague freeze frames implying pause and reflection, the film instead gallops along at a headlong pace energized by ellipses. And like these other early features, it's accompanied by a soundtrack of late 60s Hungarian pop music (including the title track that soundtracks the final sequence.)

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Binding Sentiments (1969) - More intergenerational tension, with the great Torocsik Mari (Elektra, Love) as the widow of a Great Man dealing with her cranky son and his new girlfriend. He uses his girlfriend to manage his mum's "hysteria" and they resort to kidnapping her and locking her up in an alpine prison to die for - more like a luxury dacha. Ultimately, both women come to the realization that their blokes were pretty shitty. Again, it's beautifully shot in black and white, is laced with cool Hungarian pop music, and smuggles in an oblique critique of the Communist patriarchy / patriarchal Communism (chicken, meet egg).

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Don't Cry, Pretty Girls! (1970) - It's almost inevitable that Meszaros makes a musical after the major role pop music played in her first two features, and this one is wall-to-wall music. The slender story is about a young couple planning to marry, and falling in and out of love with the idea, if not each other. They're deeply enmeshed in the youth scene and the film is as much about their cohort and the bands they follow as about the central relationship. The action of the film is basically concert, concert, concert, punctuated by various clashes with authority. The music is really good, and it stretches along a folk / psych / prog axis.

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Nine Months (1976) - This is a really well-made and toothsome film that's extremely off-putting due to its neanderthal premise. Monori Lili plays Juli, a new, drafted employee at a factory who's immediately stalked by her creepy boss Janos (Jan Nowicki). He waits for her after work, follows her around town, proposes marriage the day after they meet (he already has the rings), follows her to her parents' home in another town, and ultimately rapes her. What does Juli do? She tells him to leave her alone, but only for about five minutes of screen time. Then she falls head over heels in love with him. They plan to marry, even though she already has a child by her former professor. Janos continues to behave in a grotesque fashion, being violently jealous, bullying and controlling. That's okay, because Juli reckons he's that old-fashioned movie type: the rapist with the heart of gold. Things finally (finally!) come to a head after Janos refuses to tell his snobbish family about Juli's sprog and Juli takes it upon herself to do so. She was expressly forbidden to do this, so this act of defiance is unforgivable and Juli is thrown out into the snow. Eventually Janos comes crawling back, but to our great relief Juli won't have a bar of it and heads off to a new career in a new town. Until the next psychopath comes along. Oh, and the film ends with the actress giving birth to Janos's child (graphic and unsimulated), also in defiance of his edict.

I think I can see what Meszaros was doing here: taking the most atrocious misogynist fantasy and seeing if she can scrape a feminist parable out of it. But for me, it doesn't really work, because Juli just seems to flip-flop from doormat to iron lady as each scene demands, and for much of the film it's as if she doesn't realize how abusive Janos is, even when it's blatantly obvious to us and the other characters. And it's not as if this is a good relationship gone bad, which might have cut her some slack: he's clearly bad news from the first day they meet and she seems rather dim not to run a mile.

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The Two of Them (1977) - And how weird it is that Monori and Nowicki are back for Meszaros's next feature, still called Juli and Janos, and still a nightmare couple - though they don't seem to be playing the same characters. This time Nowicki is an abusive alcoholic, and the attraction / repulsion dynamic is more comprehensible. In this film, they're offset by Marina Vlady, Monori's boss at a textile factory, who takes Juli under her wing when she realizes how difficult her situation is. She ends up becoming a mediator between the estranged husband and wife, and their child, who is kind of an afterthought throughout much of the film until the very end, when, in a deft dramatic twist, she gets the last word. This second-hand turmoil allows Mari to realize that her husband is also a shit. A good, uncomfortable drama that makes great use of its unusual setting (Mari and Juli both live in the dormitory attached to the factory, a constrained setting with its own set of rules and petty policers of them.)

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domino harvey
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Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm

Re: 1115 Adoption

#9 Post by domino harvey » Wed Feb 23, 2022 9:54 pm

zedz wrote:
Wed Feb 23, 2022 5:36 pm

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Don't Cry, Pretty Girls! (1970) - It's almost inevitable that Meszaros makes a musical after the major role pop music played in her first two features, and this one is wall-to-wall music. The slender story is about a young couple planning to marry, and falling in and out of love with the idea, if not each other. They're deeply enmeshed in the youth scene and the film is as much about their cohort and the bands they follow as about the central relationship. The action of the film is basically concert, concert, concert, punctuated by various clashes with authority. The music is really good, and it stretches along a folk / psych / prog axis.
I didn’t like this one quite as much as you. Here’s my write up from the Musicals List
domino harvey wrote:
Fri Jul 20, 2018 12:37 am
Szép leányok, ne sírjatok! (Márta Mészáros 1970)
Jaroslava Schallerová from Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is engaged to one boy but runs off with another in this slim narrative that primarily exists so that the film can play countless tracks of Hungarian psych rock and “beat” music over the action. The film reminded me of the later No One Knows About Persian Cats in the way it blends performances into the narrative and focuses primarily on the music, not the plot. While the music is great, the film itself isn’t particularly good. My advice? Run it in the background and don’t bother trying to follow along.

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