Márta Mészáros, the pioneering Hungarian film-maker who turns 90 in September, has always looked young for her age. When she wanted to study film in her home country in the late 1940s, she was told: “We don’t need anyone from kindergarten!” She spoke fluent Russian, having lived in Russia for much of her childhood, so she went to Moscow instead, where gender was the sticking point. “There were not so many female film-makers in those days,” she tells me by phone. “A woman wanting to have that career was a joke. The men were all laughing at me.” How did she respond? “Ah, I was laughing, too,” she says, a trace of slyness in her voice.
Mészáros had the last laugh. She spent a decade making documentaries about the lives of ordinary people such as teachers and factory workers, and honing her dynamic visual style. In 1968, she became one of the first women to direct a feature in Hungary. The Girl, about a young woman trying to find her biological parents, is as radical and zesty as anything from the French or Czech new waves. It begins with the camera moving along a line of women practising archery. In its lingering curiosity about each of them, it seems to ask: What do they want? How are they going to get it? And how will society (men, usually, who swarm sinisterly around women in so many of her films) try to thwart them?
Her features, which have attracted performers such as Isabelle Huppert, Anna Karina and Delphine Seyrig, retain the immediacy of her early documentaries. One of the most startling moments in her work occurs at the end of Nine Months, her first colour film, made in 1976. A confident young woman (Lili Monori), pestered by her saturnine boss into dating him, eventually falls pregnant; the movie ends with reality bursting through the carapace of fiction like a fist through the screen. “When I offered Lili the film, she said: ‘That’s funny, I’m going to have a baby myself.’” And that final scene, in which Monori gives birth on camera? “Oh, she didn’t need much persuasion. She was in it for whatever novelty there was.” Just another day at the office, then.
Mészáros has been astonishingly prolific, making roughly a film a year up to the late 1990s, with not a mundane frame among them. Somehow, she also squeezed in several marriages, including one to another groundbreaking Hungarian director, Miklós Jancsó, who made The Round-Up. (Some of her films have been shot by their son, the cinematographer Nyika Jancsó.)
In 1975, she became the first female director to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival, for Adoption. Its subject matter was controversial: a woman in her early 40s longs for a baby by her married lover, yet doesn’t want him to leave his wife. She finds solace in her friendship with the teenage girl who borrows her spare room for occasional trysts. Mészáros’s use of the closeup, her preferred visual tool, is striking: during a scene in which the women are talking in bed, she holds one face at a time in extreme closeup before panning across to the other, rather than diluting the impact with a cut or a two-shot.
That award for Adoption, she says, “marked the end of a process by which I had become established in the eyes of male directors”. Did she feel alone in the industry? “It seemed to be just me and Agnès Varda. We used to laugh about it together: everywhere we went, people would ask us: ‘How do women make films?’”
Did she experience any kinship with her contemporaries – after all, Fassbinder also specialised in stories about the impact of social forces on emotional and psychological states. However, she sounds impatient with the question. “I didn’t think about that,” she says. “I made the films I wanted to make.”
All except one. Though she touched on her family history in the autobiographical Diary films – beginning with Diary for My Children in 1984 – she was never able to tackle the subject as explicitly as she would have liked. The death of her father, a sculptor killed in the Stalinist purges, was off limits under a regime that would brook no criticism. “I wanted to show in a political drama what happened to my parents because of the Soviet Union: my father was executed, and my mother died of a broken heart. They should not have died that way. It was censorship which stopped me being able to address that directly.”
Before she goes, I ask whether she has any plans for her 90th birthday, expecting her to say something along the lines of a party or perhaps a cruise. She responds with a little giggle. “What I’d really like to do is make another film,” she says. Don’t put it past her.
• The Cinema of Márta Mészáros is at BFI Southbank, London, until 31 July, and on BFI Player from 17 July. Adoption is available on Blu-ray by Second Run.
• This article was amended on 15 July 2021 to clarify that Márta Mészáros was one of the first women to direct a feature in Hungary, rather than the first woman as an earlier version said.
