The Heiresses
The brilliance of a young Isabelle Huppert lends quiet intensity to this piercing period elegy. Budapest, 1936: Szilvia (Lili Monori), a wealthy heiress to an enormous family fortune, befriends Irén (Huppert), a young shopgirl of modest means. Unable to give birth, Szilvia offers Irén money in exchange for conceiving a child with her husband (Jan Nowicki) on her behalf—a transaction that blurs the boundaries of the two women’s social roles and leads all involved into an explosive moral, emotional, and romantic minefield. Set amidst the glimmering decadence of a pre-war Europe being consumed by the encroaching rot of Nazism, The Heiresses is a coolly harrowing dissection of class and the cost of motherhood, and a haunting vision of lives on a collision course with history.

DIRECTOR: Márta Mészáros. WRITTEN BY: Ildikó Kórody, Jan Nowicki, Márta Mészáros. CAST: Isabelle Huppert, Lili Monori, Jan Nowicki. 1980. 105 min. Hungary. Color. Hungarian. DCP.

The Two of Them
Two women, each at a critical crossroads in life and love, find refuge in their friendship with each other in this multilayered look at female solidarity. Mári (Marina Vlady), a middle-aged director of a hostel for working women, grapples with her insecurities about aging and her husband’s impending departure to Mongolia; Juli (Lili Monori), an unruly young factory employee raising a daughter (Zsuzsa Czinkóczi, future star of Márta Mészáros’s Diary trilogy), struggles to escape from her tumultuous relationship with her alcoholic husband (Jan Nowicki). With characteristic sensitivity, Mészáros traces the protective yet complex bond that forms between the two, each at a different stage of life but dealing with the same questions of freedom and autonomy as they chart their rocky paths towards independence.