By way of introduction, an important consideration: three of the following non-Polish films are directed by women. The only exception is the fourth and final work which I will deal with in this text. But let’s go in order. The element of common interest of the three films directed by women is their attention towards female stories, two referring to the 30 year-olds, and one focused on adolescence.
Of the first two, the stronger contender is perhaps the Hungarian title Tomorrow I Die (Holnap meghalok) by Nikol Cibulya. It’s a sort of arthouse horror set entirely in the middle of a forest, where the pregnant Irma invites her half-brother and best friend from university days for the anniversary of her mother’s death, which happened under unclear circumstances right in the house where they all meet again. The assumptions are clear and generally well developed. The forest as a symbol of the unconscious. Motherhood is treated as a transitional phase, as the maturation of a self-awareness that is both necessary and traumatic, while memory (and dreams) – as an alteration of the perception of reality. Horror and fear as recognition of the truth. The ingredients are the right ones, but perhaps sometimes proposed with a superficial writing. A successful debut film but at times too didactic and predictable to become truly suggestive.
Even the Latvian Black Velvet (Melnais samts) by Liene Linde, again a first film by the director, starts from excellent story premises and then falls into some representative traps. First of all, it relies a little too much on the good actress Inga Tropa, forgetting quite quickly to better characterize the secondary characters beyond the function they have in the protagonist’s events. The idea was evidently to show the perceptive interiority of a 30 year-old artist in contemporary capitalist society, as well as her relationship with the male ego and other relational issues, but everything ends up in a disconnected and inconclusive series of somewhat.
Lastly, for this roundup of non-Polish female directors, we find the Lithuanian Toxic (Akipleša) by Saulė Bliuvaitė, the photograph of a lame beautiful girl in the deepest province of the country, who together with her friend, will do anything to become a model and leave that place. The very young protagonists possess an uncommon charisma and manage to express all the discomfort and lively sadness of that age in which revolutions slumber. Coming from Locarno, with Sundance-like vibes, the film appears successful in every part because it is able to synthesize a remarkable range of feelings by constructing coherent and visually surprising images. This same self-confident directorial style, however, often gives the impression of having chosen a deliberately disadvantaged subject in search of a sort of aestheticization of the ugly, which leads to a certain satisfaction with the staging which forces the spectator to maintain an emotional distance towards the characters.
In closing, a brief thought on the Ukrainian Bucha (Буча) by Stanislav Tiunov, who’s the only man of the group and the only director who made a film that has at its center not only a male character, but also a true story. In fact, the protagonist, Konstantin, helped many people escape from the war zone after the Russian invasion. The problem is that, in trying to emotionally charge the events, the film ends up exposing its own propagandistic intentions. Also it’s a bad imitation of an American direct-to-video action film, which is even worse. An opportunity to tell a good story that was totally wasted.
Alessandro Amato
Edited by Savina Petkova
© FIPRESCI 2024