Nine Months

Márta Mészáros is the wife of Miklós Jancsó, though it is hard to see any family resemblance in this direct, appealing and humanly complex account of a young woman's quest for (or rather, gradual acceptance of) independence. The options, between marriage to a likeable but repressive foundry foreman and life on her own with a child by a former lover, are presented in equally unenviable light. The film's case comes to rest, in the end, on which kind of life the heroine is most prepared to sacrifice herself to. Crisply filmed and politically less a matter of special pleading than much recent East European cinema.