Riddance (1973)
Director: Márta Mészáros Run Time: 81 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 1973
Starring: Erzsébet Kútvölgyi, Gábor Nagy, József Székhelyi, Marianna Moór, Melinda Máriáss
Country: Hungary
Language: Hungarian
Presented at the Film Center as part of The Films of Márta Mészáros, a highlighted retrospective of the feminist screenwriter and director’s filmography, newly restored and on the big screen, from June 10—15, 2022.
About the film:
Marta Mészáros explores class, gender, and generational conflict in Riddance, which stars Erzsébet Kútvölgyi as Jutka, a young factory worker who pretends to be a university student. The ruse retains the romantic interest of András (Gábor Nagy, who would go on to co-star with Kútvölgyi in Mészáros’s Diary for My Lovers and Diary for My Father and Mother), a handsome young man from an upper-middle-class family, but when Jutka reveals her true background their relationship becomes increasingly strained.
In representing Hungarian society’s clashing attitudes and prejudices Mészáros depicts a working class woman’s attempt to overcome the perceived inferiority of her social status as well as her own familial dysfunction and feelings of inadequacy. Following Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls‘ portrait of youthful idealism, Riddance shows with somber compassion the complex societal and cultural barriers that separate the most hopeful of young lovers.
About the filmmaker:
Márta Mészáros is a socialist and feminist filmmaker whose trailblazing, six-decade career broke barriers in cinema hierarchies, helped legitimize women’s artistic emancipation within the industry, alongside her contemporaries such as Agnès Varda and Věra Chytilová. Read more.
Gateway Film Center is pleased to present a selection of Mészáros’s most essential films.
The Films of Márta Mészáros See our upcoming films