9 - Women on the Road: Representing Female Mobility in Contemporary Hungarian–Romanian Co-productions

Summary

Introduction

In the past ten years or so, Hungarian and Romanian films have attracted considerable attention at international festivals as representatives of postnational cinemas. These co-productions accurately depict, even down to their production process, a socio-economic crisis that characterises the two countries ever since the fall of the communist régimes. Intriguingly, the arthouse cinemas of the two countries adhere to different film historical paradigms: while New Romanian Cinema (also called the Romanian New Wave) starts from a neo-realist background and has in the last few years moved towards a taste for experimentation and conceptualisation (represented most eloquently by the films of Corneliu Porumboiu), Hungarian films seem to continue the modernist tradition with their preference for a poetic figurative quality. However, despite their stylistic differences, contemporary Hungarian and Romanian films show striking similarities in representing journeys that are aborted, delayed, interrupted, with protagonists ending up in situations of entrapment. Films depicting female mobility enrich the topic of the impossible journey with further meanings that call for a gendered, cultural interpretation of this phenomenon that would contribute to the discourse on films representing transnational mobility and various types of border crossings – either geopolitical or social – triggered by three major sociopolitical events: the change of régime in 1989, the two countries’ joining of the EU in 2004 and 2007 respectively, and the economic crisis beginning in 2008. Relying on recent debates on the cinematic representation of European mobility, I propose to reveal some socio-cultural specificities of Eastern European female journeys through an analysis of three films – Iszka utazása/Iska's Journey (Csaba Bollók, 2007), Varga Katalin balladája/Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, 2009) and Bibliothèque Pascal (Szabolcs Hajdu, 2010). Each of these films represents the incomplete, fragmented journey of a female protagonist of a different age, but with similarities that enable them to be taken together as a single, representative narrative of a quest for a home and identity, endangered by betrayal and physical or psychological aggression. Moreover, the three films appear as variations of the topic of female victimisation, involving a second-wave feminist critical discourse on a traditional, patriarchal society on the one hand and a post-colonial approach to Eastern European (female) subjectivity, affected by a Western colonising gaze, on the other.