Zsófia Szilágyi’s debut film One Day (Egy nap) is a study in the purgatory of motherhood and is riddled with the sound of children; of howling and the thumping of their bodies as they throw themselves to the ground without mind or reason, the subsequent wailing, snuffling and sneezing, with laboured breathing through blocked noses. These wet child noises pursue Anna (Zsófia Szamosi), the overworked mother of Simon, Sáfi and Márkó, as she struggles through her day, along with the dull clicking and ticking of household appliances and the merciless bleep of her phone. Meanwhile, her largely absent husband Szabolcs (Leo Furedi), slowly but inevitably lumbers towards betraying her with a former friend. Anna’s role as a mother is so consuming that the moment when we see her at her work as an Italian teacher comes as a narrative shock – the pixellated slides that she shows her class are photos taken from her own younger travels, a bright utopian contrast to the grey-brown light of the family home.
One Day (perhaps obviously) takes place over the course of a single day with the zenith of the tragedy, Szabolcs’s betrayal, occurring in the late evening as she is putting the children to bed. The inexorable progression of events is paralleled by the blind necessity of the children and their myriad demands. It’s a stunning and brutal examination of the type of labour that usually takes place behind the scenes: the emotional and domestic ‘work’ of motherhood; the tasks that Anna ceaselessly performs to keep the machine of the house running. The hells move in cycles (of lice).
The relentless focus on the children and their physical, social and emotional needs provides the action of the film, which follows Anna as she navigates an ordinary weekday. All three children have packed schedules of their own and the pressure of keeping up with school, fencing, ballet, cello lessons and concerts is overwhelming. The meticulous work that childcare involves is embodied in the hopeless, clumsy physicality of the children. They cannot be trusted with anything, unable to dress themselves or to feed themselves, and require constant parental surveillance. Over the course of the day Anna endlessly dresses and undresses her children in the costumes that their activities demand. Szabolcs, his face blank with resignation, supervises his daughter while she brushes her teeth, his phone pressed up against his ear. In this film, children are markedly uncute. They fall over, bloody themselves, cry, have fevers, or can’t breathe through their noses. They drip; they make mess. There’s a particularly visceral scene in which Anna de-snots her son’s nose with the aid of some kind of sucking machine, like milking a cow, and in moments like these One Day’s obsession with bodies and their excrement is closer to Alexey German’s Hard to be a God (2013) than anything more familiarly maternal. When Anna wakes up her daughter in the semi-darkness she tells her that she dreamed of a hanging. When Anna asks her what happened next, Sári, maybe five years old, replies that the corpse was made into meat.
This is insightful – they are all meat. Szilágyi presents modern parenthood in a deeply negative light, delineating a type of exhaustion that is peculiar to our times. The children are there to be processed, turned into adults, and both Anna and Szabolcs are simply the machine’s facilitators. When Sári insists that she doesn’t want to go to school, but stay at home, Anna tells her several times that she has to go, though is unable to tell her why. This same logic forces her to do what she does, to march through the whole excruciating matter of the day without letting anything slip; the innumerable demands of their struggling, middle-class life that make certain her paralysis when faced with Szabolcs’s infidelity. Anna is crushed by the family and its needs, the banality of the daily breakfast, the seemingly endless activities that her children perform. But she’s incapable of removing herself from it – when this edifice is threatened by the unwanted presence of an old friend, Gabi, who it’s inevitable that Szabolcs will sleep with, there’s nothing for her to do but grimly endure.
There are strong similarities between One Day and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce (1975) but in this film the work is more frantic, the routine more unforgiving. Anna continually multitasks, loading the dishwater while on hold to the bank, or cleaning up the children’s mess while shrugging off the veiled criticisms of her mother-in-law. There are debts, cars, mortgages, broken washing machines, and the never-quiet presence of her mobile phone. The sounds made by the children and the carapace of the house bleed into the extra-worldly through the beeping of Simon’s computer games or the screaming of a YouTube video that he insistently shows Anna (which I’m almost positive I recognise from ‘Funny Goats Screaming Like Humans’.) There’s no silence or quarter: a crust of discarded objects rises up to swallow her on all sides.
Midway through the film, Anna, already late, tries to open the door to her car but the key doesn’t work. For a moment she looks like she’ll collapse, or start screaming, but then she realises that the car she’s been trying isn’t her car after all. Her relief is fleeting – next, it appears as though she’s forgotten what her car looks like altogether, and a second anxiety follows hard on the heels of the first. In One Day, Szilágyi presents us with an exhausted, overwhelmed world that we recognise as our own, the continually battered and degraded texture of contemporary experience, Anthropocene-living. Even in moments of respite – where Anna’s love for her children is clear – it’s still clear that she’s on duty. One Day is a truly brilliant and original perspective on motherhood, a refusal to shy away from or prettify the gruelling work that having children entails. Anna is drawn, exhausted, worn down by the endless demands placed on her, and the children’s bodies thrive at the expense of her own. In the final scenes of the film Simon describes a particular game and explains why he wants a new computer in order to play it. “If your planet explodes you can escape,” he says, and Anna, impossibly wearied, tries to give him the requisite attention – “but our graphics card and processor are not good enough.”
