AFI’s EU Showcase ’16: United States of Love

Anyone who has seen Kieslowski’s Dekalog understands there were eight million stories in the naked Polish Communist-era housing complex. Naked is indeed an apt description, physically and emotionally for these three women. Each are pining for unattainable objections of desire in Tomasz Wasilewski’s United States of Love (trailer here), which screens during the AFI’s 2016 EU Film Showcase.

It is 1990. Communism has just fallen, but the architecture still sucks. Things should be looking up, but love only brings torment and humiliation for these women. Agata is married to Jacek, but she pines for the new, relatively young priest recently assigned to their parish. It is making the business of their daughter’s confirmation unnecessarily awkward and playing havoc with their marriage.

Neighboring Iza is a secondary school principal, who assumes the death of her secret lover’s wife means their affair will finally become legit. However, much to her surprise, the doctor breaks off their relationship, using his daughter Wiola, a pupil, as an excuse. Like Glen Close in Fatal Attraction, she does not take his rejection lying down. In fact, matters get decidedly ugly.

In the spare moments when Iza is not acting obsessively stalkerish, she involuntarily retires Renata, a senior Russian teacher, who happens to be carrying a torch for Agata’s younger sister Marzena. The former beauty pageant contestant and aspiring fashion model happens to be married, but her husband is way out of the picture in West Germany, where he has rather amazingly found gainful employment. To get close to Marzena, Renata will resort to a number of petty ruses, but nobody will win their heart’s desire, least of all the objectified Marzena.

These three (or rather four) women’s stories are as grim as the concrete building they live in. Technically, the Communist era is over, but everyone is still clearly programmed to be distrustful, standoffish, and just generally wretched. Of course, it is impossible to watch States of Love without getting Dekalog flashbacks. Wasilewski even incorporates one of its most depressing plot points (from Dekalog One). Yet, Kieslowski gave viewers a wider range of emotions and occasionally maybe even a glimmer of hope, whereas Wasilewski is unremittingly bleak.

Nevertheless, the film is a showcase of bravely vulnerable and revealing performances from all four central women. Wasilewski gives them no place to hide, putting their characters through emotional wringers and often stripping them bare. Marta Nierardkiewicz is probably the most heartrending as the too trusting Marzena, while Magdalena Cielacka is the most chilling as Iza. Arguably, Dorota Kolak gives the most fully dimensional performance as Renata. The men also deserve credit for not allowing their characters become mere battle-of-the-sexes caricatures, particularly Andrzej Chyra as the heart-sick, guilt-ridden doctor.

States of Love was lensed by Romanian master cinematographer Olg Mutu, who shot Sergei Loznitsa’s In the Fog and Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which should cue viewers to expect a distinctive look and a depressing tone. It is a serious work of film, but a somewhat unbalanced exercise in auteurist cruelty towards Wasileski’s character creations. It is also a real downer. Recommended for cineastes who enjoy wallowing in miserablism (they are out there), United States of Love screens this Wednesday (12/14) and Saturday (12/17), as part of the AFI’s annual EU Film Showcase.

AFI’s EU Showcase ’16: I, Olga Hepnarova

In 1973, a mere five years after the Soviet Invasion, Czechoslovakia was ruled by the hardest hardline Communists. They were grim days for the mental health profession and hardly an era of tolerance in general. Plus, the death penalty was still very much in force. It was the worst possible time and place for young woman like Olga Hepnarová, the last woman executed in the Communist nation. Yet, in many ways she was created by the very system that tormented her. The infamous mass murderer’s story is vividly dramatized in Petr Kazda & Tomás Weinreb’s I, Olga Hepnarová (trailer here), which screens during the AFI’s 2016 EU Film Showcase.

Hepnarová’s sexual orientation was one of the unspoken issues that drove a wedge between her and her family and co-workers. In current parlance, we might also conclude she was to some degree “on the spectrum.” Regardless, we see in psychologically brutal detail how the bullying Hepnarová constantly faced short-circuited the development of her personality. As a result, she makes every painful social interaction even worse. She is not blameless for the dismal state of her life, but her family, particularly her domineering mother bear more responsibility than anyone.

Rather remarkably, Hepnarová has the wherewithal to come out of the closet and pursue a romantic relationship with the attractive Annie Hall­-ish Jitka, but it is inevitably undermined by circumstances and her own self-sabotage. Yet, that is not the immediate catalyst for her deadly vehicular assault, which prefigured this year’s Nice “terror truck” incident. Instead, it is just more drips in the prolonged water torture-like pressure that ultimately breaks her.

Polish Michalina Olszaanska (who was a marvel in The Lure) could probably be a waifish fashion model in real life, but she boldly transforms herself into the awkwardly boyish Hepnarová. Her twitchy, halting body language makes her look as uncomfortable in her own skin as she is with her oppressive environment. It is a tour de force performance that dominates and defines the film.

Yes, Kazda & Weinreb invite us to sympathize with a mass murderer who killed eight and wounded another twelve, to an extent—and we do, to an extent. Truly, the term “bullying” is not sufficient to describe the sort of pervasive hostility she endured. Yet, everyone is mired in a morass of utter and abject hopelessness.

The black-and-white cinematography of Adam Sikora (whose credits include Majewski’s incomparable The Mill & the Cross) emphasizes that unyielding drabness rather than scoring noir style points. Frankly, it is enormously impressive how Kazda & Weinreb maintain such stifling claustrophobia and a sense of steadily mounting tragedy. As accomplished as it is, it is hard to imagine anyone buying it on DVD. This is a film people ought to see, but once will be plenty. Recommended for those who can appreciate its uncompromising aesthetic, I, Olga Hepnarová screens this Monday (12/12) and Wednesday (12/14) , as part of the AFI’s annual EU Film Showcase.

AFI’s EU Showcase ’16: Stefan Zweig—Farewell to Europe

Stefan Zweig was one of the many Jewish intellectuals who escaped National Socialist-dominated Europe through Varian Fry’s network, yet he tragically took his own life in 1942, out of despair with the state of the world and his Austrian homeland. Such depression was not uncommon among European emigres. The guilt and alienation of the involuntary expatriate experience are fully explored in Maria Schrader’s Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe (trailer here), Austria’s official foreign language Oscar submission, which screens during the AFI’s 2016 EU Film Showcase.

After Thomas Mann, Zweig was the second most widely read German language novelist in Europe and the Americas during the 1930s. Thanks to The Grand Budapest Hotel, he has made a recent posthumous comeback. Farewell to Europe should further fuel the Zweig renaissance, even though does not always portray him in the most flattering light. Frankly, many viewers will be frustrated by Zweig’s reluctance to condemn the country he could no longer call home. However, they should also respect his principled refusal to grandstand or to criticize as someone now safely standing on the outside looking in.

Basically, Schrader evokes a sense of Zweig’s life in exile through five extended vignettes. In terms of tone and structure, Farewell to Europe often resembles a theater piece, but the thesp-turned-helmer shows a strong aptitude for visual composition, which helps viewer engagement. Much like its subject, it is a cerebral film that refuses to engage in cheap sentiment or phony moral uplift.

Although scrupulously buttoned-down and reserved, Josef Hader is just terrific as Zweig. When he quietly lowers the boom, it is guaranteed to flatten the audience. Likewise, Aenne Schwarz is wonderfully smart and sad as his younger but constitutionally weaker second wife Lotte. German grand dame Barbara Sukowa (who played the title role in Von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt, a fitting comparative film) gives the film some real bite as Zweig’s first wife Friderike, with whom he maintains complicated but mostly amicable relations. The way she first rebukes him and then absolves him during a New York reunion is quite compelling, but also rings consistently true.

Schrader proves to be an actor’s director, which maybe is not so surprising. Farewell to Europe also represents quite an accomplishment of mise en scène, but pacing remains an area where she could better refine her craft. Still, it is refreshing to watch an intelligent film that trusts the audience to pick up on its points without shining a searing spotlight on them. Recommended for admirers of Zweig and German-language cinema, the potential Oscar contender Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe screens this Sunday (12/11) and Wednesday (12/14), as part of the AFI’s annual EU Film Showcase.