The Girl

Forget James Dean, Alain Delon, or Marlon Brando; Mészáros’s feature debut introduces viewers to a young female rebel without a cause. Real-life Hungarian rock singer Kati Kovács stars as an orphaned woman in the big city: wasting her days amidst the clatter of a weaving factory and the catcalls of random men, she decides to seek out her birth mother in the countryside. “This institution makes me sick,” she declares after storming out of one sanctimonious speech, always moving onward, pausing with some grasping men, ignoring others, but never staying for long. Prefiguring feminist and punk protagonists of the next decade, The Girl is a revelation.