Hungarian filmmaker Márta Mészáros’ black-and-white 1975 drama serves up a close-up character study of a lonely 43-year-old woman named Kata (Katalin Berek), a widowed factory worker who wants to have a child. Kata’s lover Jóska (László Szabó), a married father who is perfectly happy with the status quo, quickly vetoes the idea, leaving Kata disappointed and torn, all the more so since she truly loves Jóska.
One day a group of teenage girls from a nearby children’s orphanage/juvenile home show up at Kata’s home, and one—Anna (Gyöngyvér Vígh)—asks whether she might be able to use Anna’s spare room for a trysting spot with her longtime boyfriend Sanyi (Péter Fried). At first reluctant, Kata eventually capitulates, magnetically drawn to the troubled girl who has been shifted among state institutions for years. Thwarted on the biological front, Kata tells Anna of her new aim of adopting a child, a plan that Anna counsels against, claiming that “abandoned children; they’re all wounded.”
Temporarily suspending her dream of having a child, Kata forms a strong bond with Anna, one that brings a sense of purpose to her life as she helps Anna gain permission to marry Sanyi. In a powerful prolonged wedding celebration sequence near the end of the film, cinematographer Lajos Koltai’s camera floats around the room capturing a wide range of emotional states—envy, bliss, anger, isolation, comradery—on the faces of Kata, Anna, Sanyi, various relatives, and orphans, presenting a microcosm of the messy human condition.
An orphaned child herself who spent time in a Soviet institution before being adopted and returning to her Hungarian homeland, Mészáros has made several films dealing with themes related to isolated, damaged children and questions surrounding motherhood.
Making its Blu-ray debut with a new 4K digital restoration, extras include a new video essay by scholar Catherine Portuges, a 2019 interview with Márta Mészáros from 2019, the 1964 short film Blow-Ball by Mészáros, Katja Raganelli’s 1979 documentary Márta Mészáros: Portrait of the Hungarian Filmmaker (featuring on-set interviews with the director and creative collaborators), and a booklet with an essay by film scholar Elena Gorfinkel.
Winner of a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival (the first win for a female director), Adoption is a solid meditative drama that benefits from strong performances and intimate camerawork in its portrait of a woman looking to, as E.M. Forster put it, “only connect.” Recommended for classic film collections in public libraries.