Showing posts with label festival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label festival. Show all posts

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Father, Son and Holy Cow (orig. Święta Krowa) [2011]

MPAA (UR would be PG-13)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing
Filmweb.pl* listing

Father, Son and Holy Cow (orig. Święta Krowa) (2011) [IMDb] [FW.pl]* (directed and cowritten by Radek Węgrzyn [IMDb] [FW.pl]* along with Cezary Iber [IMDb] [FW.pl]* and Rogerto Gagnor [IMDb][FW.pl]*) is a film that one would probably expect to play at a festival like the 24th Polish Film Festival in America/Chicago.  At the surface, it's basically a comedy that takes place in the Polish countryside.  However, as is often the case with seemingly "simple films" like this, there's more going on in the film than may initially meet the eye.

The story is about a late 50-something / early 60-something widower named Bognan (played by Zbigniew Zamachowski [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) who returns to his mother (played by Elżbieta Karkoszka [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) still living in his home town, a small village by the Baltic coast, soon after the death of his wife, Izabela (played by Lucyna Malec [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) presumably of cancer.  Bognan and Izabela had grown-up together in that small town before leaving it for the fame and fortune of the outside world.  Izabela had become an accomplished classical singer, Bognan was her accompanist on the piano.  They had spent much of their adult lives living in Berlin, GERMANY and traveling around Western Europe.  The two had daughter named Anna (played by Agata Buzek [IMDb] [FW.pl]*), who appeared in her late 20s/early 30s, who was following in her parents' footsteps and had become an accomplished classical singer with a (married) lover in Berlin as well.

It's clear that the link to their country past (dare one say "buran" past) was tenuous.  Near the beginning of the film, Bognan arrives in his home town with an urn with his wife's ashes and _disperses_ them, alone, on the beach where the two had spent a good part of their youth, dreaming of getting the heck out of there and on to adventures in the larger world.  So as we watch Bognan disperse his wife's ashes, it's clear that when the two had left their village they didn't merely leave it behind but also largely their faith and the other aspects of their "non-avantguard" past.  But now Izabela had died, and Bognan, not knowing what exactly to do, comes home for a while to reorient himself.

Well mom was ready for him ... with some chores ... ;-).  Among them were fixing the roof on the barn and taking care of the cows.  During the course of his new routine, he comes across a young Paweł (played by Antoni Pawlicki [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) a late-20 something / early 30-something young man (unmarried) who runs the local grocery store and spends his mornings running around the nearby farms collecting the produce for the day (milk, eggs...) that he sells then at his store.  On one hand a happy-go-lucky guy, on the other he seems like a "lost soul" / "walking anachronism" even if he is always full of ideas trying to make his still rather traditional existence more modern and in with the times:  On his van he writes "Pawłowski & Sons" even though there are _no sons_ to speak of, explaining that "it's a marketing ploy" giving people the impression that his business has a future.  Also talking to Bognan, and finding out that he's a musician he tells him that he read somewhere that playing music to cows makes them produce more milk.

Buran thinks Paweł's off his rocker, but depressed himself, he sets up a gramophone and plays Mozart into the the countryside one afternoon.  And low and behold, he finds that his cows _do_ produce more milk, and in particular _one_ cow that he recently bought for his mother produces far and away more than the others.  Paweł comes by the next morning and sees all the milk that Bognan's cows, including the "miracle cow," had produced.  Asks Bognan, what he played.  He answers "Mozart" and thus begins a new marketing gimmick for Paweł as he begins to sell "Mozart's Milk" to the people of the town.  Beyond being a lot of it, the milk is also really, really good!

But the cow begins to mean more to Bognan than just a cow that produces exceptional quantities of exceptionally good milk.  The cow seems kinda temperamental and one afternoon escapes through a hole in the fence (that Bognan hasn't gotten around to fixing...) and so Bognan finds himself chasing said cow, Klara, all over the countryside until ... she leads him to the place where he had dispersed his wife's ashes.  At this point, Bognan becomes convinced that ... this cow ... who he only purchased for his mother after his wife's death is somehow his wife "in another form" (her reincarnation I suppose).  So he starts to treat her well, as if she was his significant other / girlfriend.  And wants, in fact, to hold a "coming out party" with "his cow" for his family and friends.

Well, of course, both traditionalist (and very Catholic) mom and eyes-rolling, very secularist daughter, Anna, with "other issues going on" are appalled.  Bognan's mother tries to get the local priest (played by Andrzej Mastalerz [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) to "do something" about this new found threat that she calls "zoophilia."  To the film's credit, the priest looks like he'd really not like to get involved _but_ his parish _depends_ on "old ladies" like Bognan's mom.  So he trots out there and tries to "do something" even as he knows the situation is absurd and he probably figures that he won't move Bognan anyway.  Indeed, Bognan tells him and other detractors: "There are more things in heaven and on earth than can fit in your (or any) philosophy."  And continues with his project.  For her part, Bognan's daughter, Anna, finding herself pregnant by the married (to another woman) lover that she has, thinks her father has gone nuts, but eyes-rolling, decides to drive-out (from Berlin...) essentially to "assess the damage."

Much then plays out ... Among the things that play out is that the cow becomes much more like (though far differently than Bognan first understood it) to his wife than he had initially thought.  It becomes clear that the cow produced all that milk, surprisingly/uniquely _delicious milk_ and was also so temperamental because ... she was ill.  It turns out that Klara the cow (like Iza his wife who had died) had cancer.  And so Bognan then has to confront the reality of his wife's death in the slide toward death of this cow...

[There is actually a fairly strong hint in the film here that Anna had actually assisted in helping to speed Iza's death much along the line of what the vet was telling Bognan to now do with the cow.  YES assisted suicide is _against_ Catholic teaching ... but then it was also obvious that Bognan, Iza and their daughter Anna had not exactly concerned themselves much with Catholic teaching ... though Bognan's mother certainly did.  The juxtaposition of Klara the cow and Iza, Bognan's wife, becomes an interesting and _not_ altogether straightforward comparison:  When Anna assisted in prematurely bringing about the death of her mother (even at her request) did she treat her mother "with kindness/compassion" or simply "like an animal"...?]  

Finally, there's the inevitable encounter between the simple but happy but also desperately trying not to be obsolete/useless unmarried 20-30 something country bumpkin Pawel, and the eyes-rolling sophisticated 20-30 something unmarried Anna who had gotten pregnant by an already married man who _won't_ marry her.  What's gonna happen there?

Much still ensues ... and without spoiling much, the characters do find a way in the end to patch together the  conflicting strands of tradition and modernity.  Yes, it would appear that "There is more under heaven and earth that can fit under [_any_ one] philosophy ..."


* At the time of the writing of this review, machine translation of the text on filmweb.pl links given above appears to work best using the Chrome browser rather than Firefox or MS Explorer.


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Monday, November 12, 2012

The Totentanz. Scenes from the Warsaw Uprising (orig. Taniec śmierci. Sceny z powstania warszawskiego)[2012]

MPAA (UR would be R)  Fr. Dennis 4 Stars

Filmweb.pl listing

The Totentanz. Scenes from the Warsaw Uprising (orig. Taniec śmierci. Sceny z powstania warszawskiego) [FW.pl]* [2012] is an excellent historical film that writer/director Leszek Wosiewicz [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) has been taking to various international festivals over the past several years and the writer/director is still tweaking.  He came to the 24th Polish Film Festival in America/Chicago with two versions.  The version that I saw was the one that he took to the 16th Annual Shanghai International Film Festival, which he told us was more technique driven.  A second more character driven version was to be shown here later in the week.

Growing up, I always associated Polish cinema with basically the war, the war being World War II.  And since it took until the fall of Communism in 1989 to begin telling the stories of the war period (and of the subsequent Communist era) in freedom, it was perhaps inevitable that the stories of the past would finally have to come out and explode onscreen in the years following.

So even today it's almost impossible for me to imagine a festival like the 24th Polish Film Festival in America/Chicago to arrive here without a substantial number of films shown still dealing with various aspects of World War II or the subsequent Communist era.  This would seem to me to be simply inevitable, cathartic and over time redemptive.  Life across Eastern Europe (and then Poland in a special way) was simply awful (approaching the very border of "unbearable") from onset of World War II in 1939 (which began with the Nazi _and_ Soviet invasion of Poland) to the fall of Communist totalitarianism fifty years later.

Then among the various massacres, betrayals and tragedies that occurred over the course of those years, the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 led by the non-Communist/British leaning Polish "Home Army" of partisans and the subsequent Nazi leveling of the city to cruelly beat down the Poles _one last time_ while the British/Americans found that they could do next to nothing and the Soviet army resting (after a major offensive) on the other side of Vistula River from Warsaw (and thus could have done something) _chose_ to do next to nothing, was a tragedy of almost unimaginable proportions.


It is in the truly Apocalypse in the making rubble strewn streets and gutted buildings of Warsaw during the uprising that Leszek Wosiewicz [IMDb] [FW.pl]* tells his story.  And he doesn't pull any punches.  The overwhelming message of this film would seem to be that in wartime "moral clarity" is for simpletons and idiots.  The story is told entirely from the perspectives of the terrified and often pragmatic/scheming civilians hunkering down in the tunnels and basements of Warsaw while the uprising that _they_ didn't call for (but was now being viciously put down) took place all around them.

At the beginning of the film, the 30-something mother of one of the film's principal protagonists declares to the others hiding around her in some basement somewhere in Warsaw that "raped or not raped" she's going to flee the city.  And put the exclamation point on her declaration: "And if you think I'm going to resist (being raped) no I'm not.  For what?  Just to get a bullet in my head?"  Yet, there's her 14-15 year old son Marek (played by Rafał Fudalej [FW.pl]*).  What to do with him?

She tries to dress him as a woman but realizes that this will be hopeless.  The two part with Marek deciding that he's going to try to find his dad who's something of a "big shot" among the resistance leaders somewhere in the center of town.  Trying to reach him is something of a suicide mission, but Marek's mother (played by Małgorzata Sadowska [FW.pl]*) knows that _she can't save him_.  Perhaps (if he can get to him) his father can.  So he and another adolescent boy Tomek, a boy scout (scouts like Tomek had been used by the resistance leaders as message couriers during the uprising) set out to reach the resistance headquarters in the center of town, while Marek's mom sets out to flee the city.

In the course of their journey through mountains of rubble and crushed / gutted buildings with occasional German Stukas bombing overhead, they come across a young woman named Irena (played by Magdalena Cielecka [FW.pl]*) who's about to be hung by a group of terrified Polish civilians who are convinced that she's a German spy.  "Wherever you arrive, the bombs arrive soon afterwards," an angry/terrified middle aged woman in a torn, mud-covered frock accuses her.  The others already have a noose aaround her neck when Marek steps forward and declares that he knows her and that she's innocent.  Actually, he didn't know her at all, but even in the chaos he apparently couldn't bear to watch a small mob of terrified civilians put a young woman to death.

And it turns out that Irena isn't all that innocent.  A lifelong resident of Warsaw, she's nevertheless ethnic German.  But she's looking for her 10 year old half-Polish/half-German son, who apparently is running around as a courier for the resistance as well.  This is because his step-father, lifelong Warsawite and ETHNIC GERMAN AS WELL who Irena had married "to make her son 100% German" ACTUALLY CHOSE TO SIDE WITH THE POLES in the war and as a (now underground) officer in the Polish Army was again a significant member of the resistance.  (Who would have imagined...?)

So she is walking among the rubble-strewn streets and gutted basements of Warsaw looking for her son _playing everybody_ trying to find him and then hoping also to get out of the city (in her case presumably with the German army to whom she feels closer).  It is her "playing" (or "dancing with") everybody (saying what she has to say, doing what she has to do) gives the film its name "Totentanz" / "Taniec śmierty" ("Death Dance").

Much obviously ensues.  How does it turn out?  Well ... guess.

I found the film both jarring and brave and then a reminder that "from a distance" on a nice neat map somewhere war perhaps can make sense.  However from the level at which this film was made, from the perspectives of the civilians trapped in the horror, it honestly made no sense at all. 


* At the time of the writing of this review, machine translation of the text on filmweb.pl links given above appears to work best using the Chrome browser rather than Firefox or MS Explorer.


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Saturday, November 10, 2012

Lose to Win (orig. Nad Życie) [2012]

MPAA (UR would be R)  Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing
Filmweb.pl listing*

Lose to Win (orig. Nad Życie) [IMDb] [FW.pl]*(2012) directed by Anna Plutecka-Mesjasz [IMDb][FW.pl]* written by Patrycja Nowak [IMDb] [FW.pl]* and Michał Zasowski [IMDb] [FW.pl]* is a truly remarkable/compelling _pro-Life_ biopic (subtitled) about the life and death in 2008 of Polish volleyball star Agata Mróz-Olszewska [PL-orig] [Eng-Trans] that played recently at the the 24th Polish Film Festival in America/Chicago (Nov 2-16, 2012).

Agata Mróz [PL-orig] [Eng-Trans] (played in the film by Olga Bołądź [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) had played on the Polish national women's volleyball team which won the European championships in 2003 and 2004.  She also played professionally (not shown in the film) in both Poland (from 2004-2006) and in Spain (2007) participating on championship teams in both countries.  In 2007, she was forced to quit volleyball due to illness (leukemia).  Shortly afterward, she married her sweetheart Jacek Olszewski (played in the film by Michał Żebrowski [IMDb] [FW.pl]*) back in Poland.  Six months later, while awaiting a donor match for a bone-marrow transplant, the couple announced that they were pregnant.  Here Agata decided to suspend treatment for her leukemia (including the search for a bone marrow transplant) while she sought to bring her child term.  The child, Liliana, was born healthy if prematurely 4 months later.  Immediately afterwards, Agata underwent the requisite chemotheraphy and died a few months later of an infection, despite being in prescribed isolation, while her immune system was recovering from the chemotherapy.

The question that Agata faced when she first found out that she was pregnant was, of course, whether or not to have an abortion.  She was gravely ill, most of the medical team treating her cancer counseled against her suspending treatment to try to bring the child to term.  (And even from the perspective of Catholic teaching, most moralists would take the position that she would have the right to pursue treatment for her cancer even if this would result in the death of the unborn child).

Postponing treatment did put her in significantly greater risk of dieing of leukemia before the child was born.  She died after having given birth to her (healthy if premature) child.  However, she didn't really die as a result of her pregnancy or of her postponing of her cancer treatment.  Instead, she died as a result of an infection that she would have been susceptible to _in any case_ as a result of cancer treatment.  That is, she could have aborted her child and then died of the cancer/infection caused by the treatment _anyway_.  Her legacy now is her child that she did bring to birth, and in their child, Jacek has some lasting remembrance of his/Agata's love.

Agata's case _does_ give us much to think about:  If one is staring at death anyway, why not take the chance of leaving something that would survive us after we're gone.  I do think that I understand why she made the brave choice (for the life of her child) that she did.


* At the time of the writing of this review, machine translation of the text on filmweb.pl links given above appears to work best using the Chrome browser rather than Firefox or MS Explorer.


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