A Kenguru (1975)

István Varjú, nicknamed Kánya, works as a novice truck driver for the Freight Transport Company (Volán-TEFU). At first glance, many people would not expect the long-haired young man in fashionable denim clothes to have landed such a good job. On his way toward Paks in his ZiL-130 truck, carrying U-shaped components to the nuclear power plant construction site, he picks up an attractive hitchhiking girl. The freckled, carefree, flirtatious girl and Kánya quickly hit it off, and sparks begin to fly between them. She would rather go to Balatonboglár than Paks, because “the Balcsi’s there,” there’s some kind of party going on, and “we could have a good time.” In reply, Kánya points to a Camel cigarette ad pinned to the dashboard, saying that any of the people pictured would take her to Boglár—except the kangaroo, identifying himself as that one. During their conversation, the girl indirectly lets slip that she lives around Mátyás Square. They part ways on the outskirts of Paks, but Kánya soon realizes that he cannot get the blonde girl out of his mind. At the workers’ hostel, he meets his relief driver, János Balogh. They go into town, where they tell each other their life stories over beers. It turns out that each of them is missing someone: Kánya is missing a “young female creature” (the hitchhiker), while Balogh longs for a decent wife who would look after him. Kánya also says that, in his view, things happen on the road; that is where life unfolds, while arriving is nothing but failure. His much older, divorced, down-to-earth colleague does not really understand his musings. When Kánya gets back to Budapest, his first stop is Mátyás Square, in the hope of finding the hitchhiker. He also goes into the local café to ask after her, but gets nowhere—and his questions attract the attention of a shady crowd. One of them, a Roma man dressed like a gigolo, comes over and, in a forceful, no-nonsense tone, orders the young man, who is sipping his beer, out of the place. Kánya finds a more pleasant atmosphere among his friends in Kőbánya, where he is the star and the girls from the suburbs adore him. Photos of them are lined up on his truck’s dashboard, above the Toyota and Camel ads; as he drives, he glances at them now and then while listening to contemporary rock music on his cassette player. He does have a steady girlfriend, though: Zsozsó, who gets jealous after hearing about his hitchhiking adventure—and misunderstanding what happened. Later, they go to her house while her parents are out and the place is empty. Zsozsó’s life is difficult: her parents work a great deal, she rarely sees them, and her father is also an alcoholic. They make love for a long time, then suddenly wake to find that the girl’s mother has unexpectedly come home. The factory-working mother is beside herself when she catches her daughter with an unknown “pimp.” In her anger, she slaps Zsozsó hard, and refuses to believe that Kánya drives a truck (“I’ve never seen a driver like you!”)—though later she makes peace with the young man. Kánya meets his friend Jocó, who does international hauls, in the garden dining area of the Makkhetes restaurant. Jocó has just returned from his latest trip, to Marseille. As a trucker, Jocó lives high on the hog: at the restaurant he orders a large portion of steak tartare and some fine beers, then tosses the Western goods he has brought back into his friend’s lap—a branded white jacket from Monte Carlo. Jocó commands respect: the waiter fusses over him, a sunglasses-wearing drug dealer wants to buy “grass” from him, and then an attractive woman turns up looking for him, too. Kánya envies him and longs for his lifestyle. He wants to earn good money, travel a lot, and see the world, so his greatest wish is to become a trucker himself. But getting into Hungarocamion is not easy, especially for a young unmarried man, who is automatically suspected of wanting to “make a run for it” (defect) while driving abroad. Kánya also has no truck-driving experience yet. So he spends the whole summer driving his ZiL on domestic routes, constantly daydreaming about the hitchhiker and completely neglecting Zsozsó. On one of his trips, he makes it down to Balatonboglár, where, after finishing his delivery, he goes to the beach, hoping he might find his blonde love there. Then it is back to Paks. At the construction site, he reads a letter from Zsozsó, in which she says she has a big secret to share with him as soon as he gets home. On his way back to Budapest, he runs into his relief driver. Balogh, whom Kánya had thought of as a hopeless loser, is now positively glowing and proudly tells him that he has found his partner, who is waiting for him at home with chicken paprikash in their house with a garden. He invites Kánya to join them for dinner, but Kánya turns him down. When Kánya gets back to Kőbánya, his usual crowd is waiting for him on the terrace of their regular café, including Zsozsó. Before the young woman can speak to him, the barmaid hands Kánya a message from Jocó, written on a napkin: there has been a vacancy at the company, and he could go abroad. Kánya spends the whole day with Zsozsó. Because of the message, which he does not show her, she gets jealous again (she thinks it was written by the hitchhiker). At the end of the day, she tells him she is expecting his child, but that she has missed him all summer and does not want to go on like this. They argue, and when Zsozsó calls him a stupid kangaroo, he slaps her. She walks out on him and runs off. That evening, Kánya goes to drown his sorrows at the Láng Cultural Centre, but gets into a conflict there as well. He asks Cica, an attractive girl from Kőbánya with whom he had previously been involved, to dance, taking her away from Doki, another member of their Kőbánya crowd who is also out there and has since won her over. Doki does not want to give her up. The angry young man drags Kánya behind the cultural centre to settle things. They start fighting; beer crates go flying and blood is shed, but in the end they make peace, and the experience makes Kánya rethink his life so far. At dawn, he runs halfway across Kőbánya to Zsozsó’s family home on the edge of town and calls up to her from the street, trying to get her to come out. He jumps into the garden, but instead her father charges out of the house to punish him for trespassing and disturbing the peace, and lands a huge punch on Kánya. The whole family thinks that this is what caused the bruises on his face, which he actually got in the fight the night before. Kánya tells them he will marry Zsozsó and move with her to Paks, where he will work at the power plant as a well-paid isotope-transport driver. They will even be given an apartment. The parents give the couple their blessing, although not without difficulty. At the end of the film, Kánya also gets to try what it is like to drive a more substantial truck, a Volvo F88. In a parking area alongside the M7 motorway, Jocó lets his friend climb into the cab and start the engine, but Kánya actually sets off in the larger rig. He only drives it as far as the next parking area, though, and Jocó anxiously races after him in the ZiL. “This Volvo’s no big deal… my truck’s faster,” Kánya says self-assuredly as he climbs out of the truck, delivering the final line. In the closing scene, only one girl’s photograph now adorns the dashboard of the ZiL speeding into the sunset: Zsozsó’s...