Coming after Girl and two subsequent features, Riddance still seems in some ways a study for the themes which Márta Mészáros brought to fruition in Girl and, later, Adoption and Nine Months. The homeless girl thrust into the world, the aching rebellion of youth and the moodiness of young love, the all-prevailing class consciousness of a supposedly classless society--all are given a near-documentary scrutiny in the story of Jutka, a weaver in a textile mill, who falls in love with a university boy and initiates disaster when she pretends that she is also a child of the middle class. Mészáros seems to have asked her cameraman, Lajos Koltai (who also went on to international acclaim, most recently in Mephisto) to capture for her and help her memorize a world of women: the lines of placid faces on a city bus, the body of a young girl showering, the visual texture of two youths in a forest, and the look of women's laughter. A film of precise observations, then, Riddance has the clarity of a master's sketch but without the complexity of a full-blown canvas.