Agnieszka Holland: Europe/America
From 10 December 2008 to 5 January 2009, MoMA in New York is mounting what I think is the most extensive Agnieszka Holland retrospective ever attempted - though the title ‘Agnieszka Holland: Europe/America’ arguably doesn’t go far enough, given that her career included stints in communist and capitalist Europe prior to crossing the Atlantic.
The Alliance of Women Film Journalists offers a handy overview of what’s in the season - but for those in the wrong part of the world, a four-film box set of Holland’s early Polish features came out on DVD in Poland a few weeks ago. It includes Screen Tests (Zdjęcia próbne, 1977), Provincial Actors (Aktorzy prowincjonalni, 1979), Fever (Gorączka, 1981) and A Woman Alone (Kobieta samotna, 1981) - and I believe they all have English subtitles.
Posted on 7th November 2008
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Seclusion Near a Forest is much closer to the Menzel of old, though it lacks the barbed edge of his adaptations of the work of novelist Bohumil Hrabal. Indeed, to the untrained eye, it resembles a straightforward domestic comedy in which a family of four (parents Oldřich and Věra Lavička and their children Zuzana and Petr) try to fulfil a dream about having their own summer cottage, only to find that the reality doesn’t match up to the fantasy. Much of the running time is taken up with low-level bickering (especially when they end up sharing the cottage with the elderly Mr Komárek and an assortment of fleas) and slapstick interludes (the wheelchair-bound Mr Lorenc involuntarily colliding with a haystack), before everyone comes together in what’s virtually a group hug.
The film depicts the mechanism by which such a cottage might be acquired (including all the bureaucratic stages - Menzel doesn’t dwell on this, but nonetheless makes it clear that such transactions came tightly wrapped in red tape), and the potential drawbacks. By renting a room from the elderly farmer Komárek for 100 crowns a month, the Lavičkas establish themselves as potential purchasers of the entire cottage (for 20,000 crowns), the idea being that Komárek will move to Slovakia to live with his son. Other city-dwellers are doing something similar: the Zvons are pursuing a fantasy of working as millers by purchasing an old mill and paying lip service to the routines, though the flour sacks are actually filled with sand. (One of the film’s comic highlights involves Zvon, played by co-writer Ladislav Smoljak, attempting to lecture about the mill as it is operating, but his voice is inaudible over the clanking, grinding machinery). Meanwhile, the Kokešes have bought a cottage at a discount, achieved by allowing its elderly inhabitants to remain living there until they die - a running gag shows Mr Kokeš devising various stratagems to persuade them to leave early. 
Věra’s complaints give the film its dramatic tension, especially in the second half, but Menzel and his writers aren’t interested in family-rupturing rows. But, as Roberts points out, the film’s gentleness can be read in two ways: Menzel, Svěrák and Smoljak go out of their way to set up scenes in which people are given opportunities exploit others for their own gain - and then refuse to let their characters take the bait, as demonstrated by the brief scene in which the representative of the local farming collective is quite happy to sign and stamp Lavička’s form in the middle of the farmyard with no formalities. As with the later (also Svěrák-scripted) 
The most revealing indication of a change of direction comes in the subsequent sequence on Sopot beach, where Hoffman and Skórzewski make a point of showing how they concealed their cameraman, as though they were wildlife filmmakers shooting exotic but shy species. This is deceptive: there are plenty of camera angles and movements that could only have been obtained by shooting up close to their subjects (indeed, filming the cameraman himself would have necessitated a second camera positioned outside the ‘hide’), but the implied message is that unlike their previous films (which deliberately staged events for maximum impact, sometimes with actors), they’re trying to capture authentic slices of life which would go on regardless of their presence. The playful tone is carried over into the commentary, finding spurious anthropological justification for a montage of bare female legs before cutting to the male equivalent - and then panning up to reveal a shaven-headed quintet (Yul Brynner’s The King and I was a big recent hit). The filmmakers aren’t biased: they seem equally fascinated by young and old, fat and thin, and the naked breasts of comely young women and overweight middle-aged men get more or less equal screen time. 
The camera then decamps to Sopot’s famous pier, followed by the town centre, through which assorted couples, some unmarried (as the commentator tartly highlights over a close-up of a roving male hand lacking a wedding ring) either promenade or relax. Relaxation isn’t on the minds of various Miss Poland beauty contestants, though, as a montage of assorted treatments, massages and applications of nameless unguents shows what they have to go through in order to look convincingly fresh and natural on the catwalk. When night falls, the inhabitants of Sopot come out to dance. The commentator hints darkly that we may be in for a re-run of Look Out, Hooligans! as he talks of “moving to the battlefield”, though it turns out to be an entirely metaphorical one, as couples dance the night away - aside from a lone man who’s apparently waiting for Brigitte Bardot (who just become a major star in Roger Vadim’s scandalous Et Dieu créa la femme, released a few months earlier). 
Sopot 1957 could easily be mistaken for a travelogue, especially if watched with the sound turned down - but it’s worth noting what it leaves out, given that Hoffman and Skórzewski’s earlier films were rather keener on context. We’re not told, for instance, that this jazz-driven film (which infuses the entire soundtrack, not just the onscreen performances) is paying tribute to a musical art form that had been banned outright in Poland until very recently, and neither are we given any sense of Sopot’s long history. The commentary even eschews the kind of statistics that normally pepper images like this (such as the fact that the pier was and remains the longest wooden one in Europe), and any sociological observations are deliberately pitched at a trivial, jokey level. Hoffman and Skórzewski’s priority is to capture fleeting impressions from the summer of 1957, living very much for the moment. 
Pociąg
The bulk of the film is set in a single sleeper carriage, and much of that within compartment 15/16. Due to a mix-up (one of the tickets was purchased on the black market), this is inadvertently occupied by two people of the opposite sex, who turn out to have much in common. Marta (Lucyna Winnicka, the director’s future wife) is simultaneously travelling to meet her former lover in the Baltic resort of Hel, and trying to escape the attentions of Staszek (Zbigniew Cybulski), a brief fling who has followed her onto the train and is bent on stalking her (at one point even hanging outside her window as the train is moving, a scene given additional - albeit unintended - tension given that Cybulski would meet his real-life death eight years later while running to catch a moving train). Physical evidence on her wrists suggests at least one suicide attempt, revealing a woman given to passions and impulses, swinging wildly between emotional peaks and troughs.
The film’s rich supporting cast is made up of several character types. Next door to Marta (Aleksander Sewruk) and Jerzy’s compartment is a lawyer and his wife (Teresa Szmigielówna) - he’s obsessed with an upcoming case, so she spends much of her time hanging around in the corridor behaving more than a little flirtatiously with the other passengers (and clearly has eyes on Jerzy - whenever his door is open, she’s invariably visible). The corridor on the right-hand side of compartment 15/16 is also permanently occupied by an insomniac (Zygmunt Zintel, the foreman in Wajda’s A Generation/Polokenie, 1954), and occasionally by a priest and various others, with almost everyone offering caustic comments on the proceedings at some point. 
Kawalerowicz and his cameraman Jan Laskowski film these various encounters in an oppressively claustrophobic way, using wide-angle lenses to achieve greater depth of field while still making foreground characters stand out from their surroundings. The high-contrast lighting recalls film noir’s use of toned-down Expressionism. Ryszard Potocki’s production design is beyond praise - although created almost entirely in the studio, and some of the more elaborate camera movements clearly couldn’t have been shot on an actual moving train, the illusion is wholly convincing. The back projections are state of the art, augmented by carefully-designed lighting on the actual set, and whenever a character leans out of the window, powerful fans suggest high winds - small wonder that the film won the Venice Film Festival’s Georges Méliès award for its technical achievement. 
DVD Distribution: There are at least three DVD releases of Night Train, though the single-disc Polish edition (Best Film Co, Region 0 PAL) doesn’t appear to have English subtitles. However, the version included in the same company’s box set 50 Years of the Polish Film School volume 2 (50-lecie Polskiej Szkoły Filmowej 2 not only has English subtitles but also a well-produced 36-page booklet in Polish and English. There’s also a US edition available on the Polart label (Region 0 NTSC), which I haven’t seen.