A NEW AGE OF WOMEN's PICTURES

Contemporary Hungarian cinema presents a growing number of films that can be called melodramas in terms of their plot and formal excess compensating for the few dialogues and passivity of the protagonists. Many of these films belong to feminine sub-genres, more specifically maternal melodramas or the melodramas of single women. However, these films are not domestic melodramas in the sense that family and a home are invariably missing from them. Home ceases to be a place where these characters can make themselves understood without much difficulty, which triggers the typical melodramatic paradox scenario that they cannot be at home and be themselves at the same time (see more about this in Király 2015: 178). In contrast with the classic melodrama where the milieu appeared as an imprint of the character's psychological condition, the decor of the places they move in or away from does not or only partially reflects their state of mind, which calls for other expressive, often aural solutions. Additionally, in the Eastern European context, work-related mobility and post-communist disorientation leads to changing constructions of ‘womanhood’, of the ‘maternal’ and the ‘feminine’. With the opening borders after the change of regime and EU membership, many Eastern European women – single or married – chose to leave the country and their homes for varying lengths of time, attracted by a better labour market in Western European countries. This new, work-related mobility creating a similarly mobile notion of home challenges the traditional roles of womanand motherhood that were still valid under communism.

There are seven films that I will be referring to in my analysis, three of which are maternal melodramas: Ágnes Kocsis's Fresh Air (Friss levegő, 2006), Peter Strickland's Katalin Varga (Varga Katalin balladája, 2009), Szabolcs Hajdu's Bibliotheque Pascal (2010), and four are single woman-melodramas: Kornél Mundruczó's Johanna (2005), Ágnes Kocsis's Adrienn Pál (2010), Károly Ujj-Mészáros's Liza, the Fox Fairy (Liza, a rókatündér, 2015) and Ildikó Enyedi's Of Body and Soul (Testről és lélekről, 2017). What is intriguing about these films is their general lack of emotion: not only that violent emotional outbursts are completely missing, but (despite the huge pressure of their social circumstances) the female protagonists remain expressionless, moving around with blank faces and minimal gestures, almost speechless.