Mészáros, Márta (1931—)

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Mészáros, Márta (1931—)

Prolific Hungarian screenwriter and film director. Name variations: Marta Meszaros. Born on September 19, 1931, in Budapest, Hungary; daughter of Laszlos Mészáros and a mother who died while Mészáros was young; attended VGIK (Moscow Academy of Cinematographic Art); married a Rumanian citizen, in 1957 (marriage ended 1959); married Miklos Jancso (a director), around 1966.

Fled Hungary with family (1936); returned to Hungary (1946); made first short film (1954); moved to Rumania (c. 1955); returned to Hungary (1959); joined Mafilm Group 4 (mid-1960s); made first feature film (1968); won Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear award (1975); won Fipresci Prize at Cannes Film Festival (1976); won Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize (1984).

Selected filmography:

The Girl (1968); Binding Sentiments (1969); Don't Cry, Pretty Girls (1970); Riddance (1973); Adoption (1975); 9 Months (1976); Two Women (1977); Just Like at Home (1978); On the Move (1979); The Heiresses (1980); Mother and Daughter (1981); Silent Cry (1982); Land of Mirages (1983); Diary for My Children (1984); Diary for My Loves (1987); Bye Bye Red Riding Hood (1989); Travel Diary (1989); Diary for My Father and Mother (1990); My Preferred Opera: Portrait of Barbara Hendrix (1990); Looking for Romeo (documentary, 1991); Gypsy Romeo (1991); The Last Soviet Star (1991); Sisi (television, 1992).

Filmmaker Márta Mészáros has achieved international renown for her thoughtful, incisive portrayals of life behind the former Iron Curtain, but she is also a critical and commercial success, a rarity for a filmmaker of any origin. According to film critic Derek Elly, she "has created a body of feature work which, for sheer thematic and stylistic homogeneity, ranks among the best in current world cinema." Since the late 1960s, her movies have dealt with such tough issues as the subjugation of women, urban vs. rural frictions, alcoholism, and children reared in state orphan-ages—which was, for the generation born in Eastern Europe during and immediately after World War II, not an uncommon childhood.

Mészáros herself had a comfortable early life, albeit one disrupted by political strife and war.

Born in Budapest in 1931, the daughter of renowned sculptor Laszlos Mészáros, she and her family were forced to flee to the Soviet Union as a result of her father's socialist convictions. Though she returned to Hungary for a short time after World War II in 1946, she received her education in Russia, including schooling at the Moscow Academy of Cinematographic Art. Back in Hungary, she worked for Newsreel Studios in Budapest and, beginning in 1954 with Smiling Again, made four short films. Moving to Rumania in the mid-1950s, she married a Rumanian, but the marriage was brief and she returned to Hungary once more in 1959. She began making short documentary films, some concerning science, such as Mass Production of Eggs, and others on Hungarian history and culture. In the mid-1960s, Mészáros became involved with the state film cooperative Mafilm Group 4, through which she met her future husband, director Miklos Jancso.

Mészáros made a successful debut as a feature-film director with The Girl in 1968. It starred Hungarian pop singer Kati Kovacs in a tale of a young factory worker who embarks upon a search for her biological parents and is justifiably disappointed when she finds them. Binding Sentiments, released the following year, was a bit more humorous, though the subject matter was anything but: a young man's mother drinks too much and grieves over her late, famous husband, so the son installs his spirited fiancée, who has a psychologically sadistic streak, at the mother's lakeside villa to keep an eye on her. That film also starred Kovacs in the role of the younger woman.

In 1970, Mészáros released Don't Cry, Pretty Girls, which included some musical numbers; three years later came Riddance, a Romeo-and-Juliet tale about Hungarian parents unwilling to accept their son's girlfriend, who has no family and grew up in an orphanage. For 1975's Adoption, about a 40-ish woman who wants a child, Mészáros took the Golden Bear prize at that year's Berlin Film Festival. Her next film, Nine Months, was also her first in color. Released in 1976, it chronicles the love affair between a factory worker and her engineer boss. Nine Months is also notable for Mészáros' filming of an actual birth by the film's star, Lili Monori , at the end of the movie. In 1977's Two Women, Mészáros again addressed feminist issues and the plight of working women with unhappy marriages in the contemporary world.

Just Like at Home, released in 1978, was a bit off-beat for the director: a male university student befriends a ten-year-old girl, and her parents allow her to live with him in Budapest in order to receive better schooling; his girlfriend is resentful, and in the end he learns far more about life than his young charge. On the Move, Mészáros' 1979 work, chronicles the tale of a French scientist who visits her mother's grave in Poland and has an affair with an actor. The Heiresses, released in 1980, was Mészáros' first period film. Set during World War II, it centers around a rich, highborn woman married to a military officer. She is infertile, but needs an heir to inherit her family money, and therefore convinces a young Jewish woman to carry her husband's child in secret. A romance develops between her husband and the young woman, and in the end the heiress reports them both to the authorities, who put the husband in prison and send the young woman to a concentration camp. (This latter reflects the fact that Hungarian Jews were sent to concentration camps in 1944.)

Mother and Daughter (also released in France as Anna) was a 1981 co-production with a French studio. In it, a Budapest clothing designer spots a French couple with their young daughter, who looks suspiciously like the same child the designer had to give up when she fled Hungary and then Vienna during the 1956 political upheavals. Obsessed with her long-lost daughter, she follows the family to Paris. Mészáros produced two other films during the early 1980s, Silent Cry (1982) and Land of Mirages, a 1983 adaptation of Gogol's The Inspector General, before devoting herself to Diary for My Children, released in 1984. That film is clearly autobiographical: a young girl flees Hungary with her family and lands in Stalinist Russia, where she leads a privileged communist life before rebelling against its elitism as a young adult. Mészáros was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year for the film.

Her other works include Diary for My Loves, released in 1987, and Bye Bye Red Riding Hood, a 1989 update of the classic fairy tale. Shot partially in Montreal, it was the first ever Canadian-Hungarian joint film production. With the collapse of the Eastern Bloc's Soviet-dominated political structure beginning in 1989, Mészáros was free to turn her pen and lens to even more incisive topics. One of these works is 1991's Looking for Romeo, a documentary set in Hungary about the Gypsy (Roma) population, who are the target of discrimination throughout much of Eastern Europe. A feature film from the same year, Gypsy Romeo, is another Romeo-and-Juliet tale, about an "illicit" romance between a Hungarian teen and her Roma boyfriend. Also in 1991, Mészáros co-wrote and directed The Last Soviet Star, the story of Stalin's favorite screen actress, Liubov Orlova. Sisi, her 26-segment work about the life and times of Empress Elizabeth of Bavaria (1837–1898), was shown on Hungarian television in 1992.