Competition
Dir. Feliks Falk

The fascist occupation of Krakow. Another anti-Jewish raid catches little Róza and her mother in a café, where she is enjoying cakes on the occasion of her sixth birthday. Mother tells her to run to the church and wait for her there. Róza’s mother never comes but Joanna, a young average woman her mother’s age will take the girl to live with her in a sturdy old house. On the chest of drawers there is a photo of Joanna and a young man, both wearing ski suits. They are herself and Zbyshek on the snow-covered range in Tatry during their holiday in Zakopane, when he proposed to her. Joanna waits for Zbyshek to comeback from the front and in the meantime hides Róza from the concierge’s curious gaze and reads her fairy tales in the evenings.

As a director Feliks Falk became known with his late 1970s movie “Wodzirej”, which our old-time moviegoers are likely to remember. It was the time when Zanussi very closely approached the formula of Polish Catholic melodrama, which will be exemplified in its purest form by his films based on events in the rear during the second world war («Rok spokojnego slonca», «Wherever You Are...»), and Kieslowski, who purified the genre in “Dekalog”, was getting ready to direct his feature-film debut. The essence of Polish Catholic melodrama is to show the world and the people surrounding the protagonist as walls which are gradually closing in and pushing the character out of this world (suicide or madness is the usual outcome for characters in these movies) which can be discerned in the light imperceptibly falling on the forehead of the heroine like a gloomy halo, or sometimes illuminating inanimate objects (like a boiling kettle in the hospital in Zanussi’s “Bilans kwartalny”). The same light barely touches Joanna’s curls, while the events of the movie, the retelling of which will deny you the pleasure of discovering the plot while watching the film, are nothing else but her gradual ousting from life. The claustrophobic effect is achieved by deadly blush hues of the flat and nearby streets, by frequents shots of the front door hall with the fateful figure of the postman in the shade and incessant ringing of the door bells, vigorous knocks, rattle of door chains on the soundtrack which the Russian mentality immediately associates with Mandelshtam’s poem about Leningrad reworked by Pugacheva.

Falk’s new film is conceived in such lofty traditions that even the almost total lack of originality can’t be called a drawback or a miscalculation: we don’t blame the organist for being faithful to Bach’s original. But there are a couple of surprise after all. One of them is the paradoxical, unusual, but fairly legitimate interpretation of one of the liveliest and most relevant French novels of the 19th century - Stendhal’s “Le Rouge et le Noir” - by the German officer. The second is the finale (which can be safely disclosed in the films of this genre because it is part of the formula). Instead of Polish classic filmmakers it calls to mind a German classic: Joanna walks away along the snow-covered range of the Tatry holding that very photo from the chest of drawers just like Anselm does in the closing lines of Hermann Hesse’s tale, when he completed the transition from this world to the spiritual world by retreating into an iris bud, which opened like a cave. In his youth it was the focus of his fantasies about invisible universes.

Alexey Vasiliev