I know that you know that the Romanian National Film Archive had a couple of films made by the fabulous Márta Mészáros, which comprises more than the documentaries she directed in her years at the Sahia Film Studios. Just a little before our current era, on the 7th of March, 2020, I helped organize what was to be my final screening within the FILM MENU collective, which was no more, no less than a marathon of 4 films directed by Mészáros across the seventies and eighties. Those who went to the Cinematheque that day know that two of those four films were ruthlessly cut by the authorities before running on Romanian screens. Which isn’t any sort of news, in the end – this is just one of the many idiosyncrasies that the Bucharest-led regime espoused towards the films that would, in time, comprise the canon of Eastern cinema.

Meanwhile, MUBI has put together a retrospective of some of the filmmaker’s works, and Il Cinema Ritrovato has just screened her debut feature, The Girl (1968), presented in a restored version. I’m in Bologna, and the mystic in me cannot help himself but scream from the mountaintops that seeing a Mészáros film in an actual cinema has somewhat exorcised the stunted cinephilia of the last year and a half; things feel again like they used to on the 7th of March, 2020.

The Girl could easily, much too easily fall into the category of leisurely films directed by male and female directors (alike) from the Eastern Bloc, all throughout the seventies. But Mészáros’ protagonist is neither blonde, nor a charming girl, much less a daisy. Erzsi Szõnyi is as earthly as one could get. And since the land onto which everything transpires is socialist, she is thus a worker in a textile factory, thus enjoying a salary and the camaraderie of her colleagues; she is just a simple all-and-out citizen, who grew up in an orphanage and turned into a fine young woman. She met her best friend in the boarding house and, during a session of small talk, they hover over Erzsi’s quite legitimate obsession of meeting her parents, a state which Mészáros, an orphan herself, sketches as a sort of uncertainty, as an infinite back and forth. But, one day, everything comes to a head – after placing an ad in the paper, the girl gets a letter wherein she’s invited to visit her biological mother’s country-house. All is said and done, Erzsi enters a small universe that was sealed to her until recently, one in which the girl’s hairdo, her sunglasses, her jeans, her everything attracts the attention of others onto how ill-fitting this girl from faraway seems.

I mentioned the fact that Mészáros knows what it is to be an orphan. And only this is capable of creating such a moment like the one when the mother and the girl meet for the first time. I cannot forget that travelling shot which follows Erzsi’ face, hidden behind a pair of black sunglasses, her hair slightly ruffled, passing by a sturdy wooden fence, carefully looking at the things behind it – her mother’s household, its garden groomed to a T, like in the noblest of fairy tales about villagers. There’s no place for sweet talk between these two somber women, each in her own way. We’ve been much too used to the tears and ecstasy of reunions, where nobody needs any sort of confirmation since, all of a sudden, the sense of belonging is self-evident – it’s known, seen and felt. There’s no trace of it here, Erzsi asks her for an ID card, and the woman shows it to her.

The distance dividing them is of a cosmic order. With all of the sympathy that she is capable of showing to the rural world, Mészáros still clearly conveys to her protagonist in no unclear terms that she is a stranger to such a patriarchal order. In a moment of calmness, as the family is watching television, the father is sat in the middle; the boys to the left, the women to the right. On Sunday, at the village’s weekly celebration, the wives sit down on a bench like a chain of black headdresses. There is nothing more different than this when compared to Erzsi’s life, who, once she leaves the villages, seeks to exorcise what she has witnessed in an affair with a random boy, who she breaks up with shortly afterwards.

Mészáros’ debut signals the great cinema that will follow. All along the entire film, we see a sixteen-year-old boy who has fallen head over heels for Erzsi. Timid and strange, just as teenagers are, he tries to take her out dancing, not by charming her with words, but rather by performing a sort of dance for her, where every single move, relaxed yet yearning, is directed at her. I don’t know if anyone has ever noticed how, at times, you can see someone dancing for someone, not with someone. It feels strange for me to fixate on this precise moment in the film, but the truth is that moments like these turn Mészáros’ cinema into such a towering triumph, the fact that it’s similar to a plant which will catch roots if you break a piece away from it, and will become self-sufficient.

Călin Boto

Film critic and journalist. He is an editor at AARC and writes the ”Screens” features for Art Magazine. He collaborates with many publications and film festivals as a freelancer and he is strangely attached to John Ford's movies.