Monthly Archives: February 2016

  • In the Name Of

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Wimię...

    Malgorzata Szumowska (2013)

    Although there’s plenty wrong with it, In the Name Of is more than the sum of its parts, thanks to the protagonist Father Adam.  Malgorzata Szumowska and her co-writer Michal Englart have created a complex character; Andrzej Chyra plays him brilliantly.  Adam is conceptually familiar, a Catholic priest struggling unsuccessfully to suppress the desires of the flesh.  He’s been transferred from a parish in Warsaw to a small rural one, where he runs a centre for teenage boys with behavioural difficulties.   The teenagers are themselves transferred there from a reformatory; the centre is a potential stepping stone to their reintegration into society, and finding paid employment.   Adam and his lay assistant Michal (Lukasz Simlat) have impressed the church authorities with how successfully they’ve tamed some of these feral boys.   Needless to say, there are plenty of outdoor and sporting activities.  Adam is amiable and joins in the football and swimming but he evidently has something on his mind, and a shot of him masturbating in the bath confirms that the something is sexual:  the centre’s community of adolescent males, forever rough-housing and seen often with their tops off, makes it pretty obvious that it’s homosexual.  When Michal’s bored wife Ewa (Maja Ostaszewska) tries to seduce Adam, he tells her, ‘I’m already taken’, and the viewer knows by now that he’s not referring to his vow of celibacy (although Ewa assumes he is).  As a drama, In the Name Of is in suspense for some time after this scene – but that suspense chimes with Adam’s state of mind.

    The priest keeps himself fit jogging in the woods around the centre in a vain attempt to develop mens sana in corpore sano.  The towering trees are a fine image (and the lighting – Michal Englert was also the cinematographer – is expressively varied throughout) but the idea is clichéd:  Adam is running-away-from-himself.  I wasn’t convinced either that the boys – whom we see from the very first scene as capable of cruelty both physical and verbal – would accept a hardly macho priest as sexually above reproach simply because he’s a dude (fortyish Adam wears brand jeans and trainers when he’s not in his clerical outfit).  There’s brief speculation among the boys about what Adam does for a sex life but no suggestion is made that he might be gay until a crucial point in the narrative.   Szumowska’s storytelling is sometimes puzzling or careless, perhaps both.  The boy that Adam is particularly attracted to is Lukasz (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz):  he has Christ-like looks but his alias is Humpty (I never got this nickname) and he’s regarded as a joke by the more assertive boys.  Lukasz can’t swim but takes his turn diving into a lake with the others; he doesn’t resurface and has to be rescued by Adam and Michal.  Back on dry land, the two men try to revive Lukasz, the other boys gather round, and Adam’s face expresses terrible anguish.  Szumowska cuts – before it’s clear whether Lukasz has started breathing again – to the rest of the community at a refectory meal, where a newcomer Adrian (Tomasz Schuchardt) is introduced.   You wonder if Lukasz has died and Adrian has taken his place at the centre.  Lukasz reappears, alive and well, in a subsequent scene.

    Another boy, Rudy (Kamil Adamowicz)[1], tells Adam how he once gave a man a blow job; he’s scared what would happen if the others ever found that out.   Not long afterwards, Adam witnesses Rudy being anally raped by the ominously Aryan Adrian (aka ‘Blondie’).  Gimlet-eyed Adrian, who seems from an early stage to have got Adam sussed, is presumably responsible for daubing ‘The priest is a faggot’ on the door of the centre.   Adam, returning from an early morning run, storms into the boys’ dormitory to demand who wrote the words.  The interrogation is barely underway when Adam discovers that Rudy is missing.  The boy has hanged himself.  It’s odd that, when the police arrive, nothing more is said about the graffiti – even more odd that, when Adrian openly accuses Adam of being queer, the other boys say he must be joking and don’t seem particularly struck by the normally pacific Humpty’s fighting with Adrian to defend Adam’s honour.

    Michal has growing doubts about Adam’s relationship with the boys and goes to report him to a bishop.  In the Name Of, which has so far presented Adam sympathetically, looks to be turning conventional about the scandal of the Catholic Church’s turning a blind eye to paedophile priests.  The bishop is obviously played and given obviously ironic lines.  (He tells Michal that, of course, the Church would never cover things up but that he has no worries in this particular case, that what led to Adam’s transfer from Warsaw has an innocent explanation, etc.)  Yet from this point onwards, the character of Adam gets all the more interesting.  This crystallises in a Skype call to his sister in Toronto.  Adam tried to contact her before and anxiously muttered, ‘Come on, pick up …’ when she didn’t answer.  He wanted the opportunity to speak his mind sooner.  When they do talk, you begin to understand how tormented Adam is – he has a real faith and takes his religious vows seriously – and the extent to which he too is a victim of the Church’s self-protective secrecy:  part of him would like not to be transferred again.  Adam admits to his sister that he’s attracted to the teenagers – that he’d like to ‘fuck the lot of them’ – but he also insists that, ‘I’m not a paedophile, I’m a faggot’.  This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Adam drunk and his sister dismisses what he says as the drink talking: ‘I won’t talk to you when you’re like this – you’re a good priest and a good person’, she insists.  She doesn’t want to hear the uncomfortable truth from her brother but she’s right too – he is good, in both these respects.  (This powerful sequence also makes you appreciate the similarities and differences between Skype and the confessional.)

    At this stage, Father Adam hasn’t evidently had sexual intercourse with Lukasz (or with any of the other boys) although there’s no doubt that their interactions have been sexually gratifying to Adam.  After the incident at the lake, Lukasz asks Adam to teach him to swim.  The swimming lesson that follows is visualised rather predictably (suggesting both baptism and, as Adam supports Lukasz’s body in the water, a different kind of initiatory rite).  It’s followed by an episode which, although it may be too weighted and visually flamboyant, has undoubted impact.  Lukasz runs off into the middle of a vast field of shoulder-high corn and Adam calls for him.  There’s no answer except for ape-like calls, which Adam reciprocates.  In a later scene, Adam and Lukasz are in a stationary car together and the priest lays his head on the boy’s shoulder.   Adam does get a transfer to another parish.  A church procession along a country road to mark the end of his time in the rural community and his leave-taking of Michal (very well played by Lukasz Simlat) are differently impressive, as is Adam’s final exit from the place.   As he drives away, he glimpses Lukasz at the side of the road and steadily increases speed.  The narrative then jumps forward to what seems to be some weeks or months later.  The centre is burned to the ground.  Adam’s successor is building a new church in its place and Lukasz has a job on the building site.  The other men talk about what a good job the new priest is doing, how dodgy Adam was and that he was transferred to another parish.   Lukasz immediately leaves home to find him.   (I wasn’t sure how since the other building workers don’t name the place Adam’s gone to – they just say how far away it is.)   When he turns up at Adam’s door – late at night, in heavy rain (as you might expect) – the priest welcomes Lukasz and the two finally consummate their feelings.  There’s no sense that Lukasz has been corrupted by Adam.  They love each other.  Next morning, Adam is lying in bed and hears a single ape-call from nearby.  The reprise of this sound is obvious but emotionally effective.

    Malgorzata Szumowska closes with a sequence of (what I took to be) a group of newly-ordained priests chatting in calm, decorous surroundings.  These young men and the wild boys of the centre who opened proceedings bookend In the Name Of:  two apparently different groups which share the quality of being at least homosocial.  The camera stops on the face of one of the young priests – someone has taken his eye and, by implication, his fancy.  In Szumowska’s previous film, Elles, her treatment of a sexually interesting theme was hollow and Andrzej Chyra, who played one of the student  prostitutes’ clients, didn’t make much impression.  He is a revelation here.  This is a superb example of an actor letting the viewer see into the soul of the character – behind behaviour which would not draw attention to itself among the people with whom that character lives his life on screen.   Chyra’s significant looks are finely controlled and dissimulated.  As well as being moving in the Skype call, he’s extraordinary in an earlier scene in which Adam, alone in his room, gets drunk and plays rock music.  He takes a framed photograph of the pope (Pope Benedict XVI) from the wall and you fear he may do the melodramatically conventional thing and smash it to smithereens.  Instead, he dances with the photograph then replaces it on the wall then dances with it again, still in at least two minds.  Andrzej Chyra expresses Adam’s mixed feelings exquisitely; the effect is suspenseful, sad and funny.   There’s the same rich ambivalence as Adam lies in bed in a later scene, thinking with pleasure about Lukasz and with guilt about the pleasure.

    8 October 2013

    [1] This may not be the right name or actor.  I thought this boy was called ‘Grovy’ or similar but there’s no such character in the IMDB full cast list.

  • Floating Skyscrapers

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Plynace wiezowce

    Tomasz Wasilewski (2013)

     The writer-director Tomasz Wasilewski has described Floating Skyscrapers as Poland’s ‘first LGBT film’ although it’s the second that I’ve seen, after In the Name Of, in the space of two months.   Wasilewski’s movie (his second feature) is about a swimmer discovering his homosexuality.  It opened in London at the end of the week that began with the diver Tom Daley announcing on YouTube that he’s in a relationship with a man (Dustin Lance Black, who wrote Milk) so Floating Skyscrapers might be thought highly topical.  Greg Louganis, perhaps the greatest of all divers, was one of the first male sports stars to come out as gay – in the 1980s – but doing so is still unusual enough for the subject to make for potentially strong drama.  Wasilewski, however, isn’t interested in this.  He doesn’t make clear how high-ranking a swimmer the protagonist – Jakub, known as Kuba – is.  He doesn’t indicate what the other swimmers whom Kuba trains with think about his sexuality – except for the one who occasionally has sex with him in the toilets before Kuba starts the relationship with a young man called Michal that’s at the centre of Floating Skyscrapers.

    Michal isn’t part of Kuba’s training squad although the two of them end up in the water together more than once.  Wasilewski appears to have chosen a swimming context for its visual possibilities – to show unclothed, well-toned bodies and to suggest Kuba’s psychological situation:  he swims deeper underwater than any of his competitors.  The images that Wasilewski creates to suggest sexual repression and to reflect Kuba’s state of mind are mostly familiar.  After an opening sequence in which you hear but see nothing of what’s going on behind closed cubicle doors at the aquatic centre, Kuba is shown doing exactly what the priest in In the Name Of ­did in the early stages – pushing himself hard on a run through a forest of huge trees.   An underground car park is a recurring significant location (it’s where Michal is eventually murdered by a group of brutal homophobes).  There are also shots from inside a car, travelling fast – in the traffic lane that it must stay in – towards an inevitable destination   The larger physical landscape of the film is one of the most unlovely of the year – concrete buildings and bridges, which are empty of people as well as god-forsaken.  In spite of references to extreme summer heat, the weather is never good and there’s unsurprising meteorological turbulence, including a strategically placed storm.   Although Poland isn’t spoken of in the same homophobic breath as Russia, Wasilewski suggests that it’s no fun being gay there.  The world of Floating Skyscrapers – on dry land anyway – is one of existential bleakness.

    The claim that Wasilewski has made for his film may well be true in terms of physical and sexual explicitness but Kuba – for all that Mateusz Banasiuk plays him admirably – isn’t anything like as interesting a character as Andrzej Chyra’s Father Adam in In the Name Of.   It’s hard to see Kuba’s situation as typical of a young gay man’s in Poland today.  He lives with his mother Ewa (Katarzyna Herman) and his girlfriend Sylwia (Marta Nieradkiewicz) in Ewa’s apartment, and the mother – who hates the girlfriend – appears to desire Kuba sexually.  When Ewa finds out that her son’s gay, Wasilewski gives her both the time-honoured lines for such an occasion:  ‘How could you do this to me?’ and ‘It’s my fault’.  Since the mother evidently likes looking at her son’s bare torso and has him massage her when she takes a bath, these clichés undoubtedly mean more than they often do:  but is Wasilewski using the extreme character of Ewa to make the old-fashioned suggestion that it’s always a mother who’s responsible for a son’s homosexuality?  Michal’s mother knows he’s gay and is sympathetic.  When Michal tells his father at a family meal, the shock revelation is swallowed up in other family conversation – with the mother taking the lead in ignoring what Michal has said.  Talking with her in her car afterwards, Michal asks, ‘Why did Father say nothing?’ when he would surely be putting the question, ‘Why did you try to change the subject?’

    Floating Skyscrapers is thoroughly misogynistic:  there are moments and images which suggest that Tomasz Wasilewski has it in for Kuba’s hapless girlfriend as much as for the manhood-eating mother.  More than once, he frames Sylwia against a mural of butterflies and the camera is static.   (This brings to mind The Collector with the sexual roles reversed.)  The relationship between Kuba and Sylwia is nevertheless the most interesting one in the film.  His determination to reassure her, and himself, that he’s heterosexual in some of their lovemaking is convincing – and Marta Nieradkiewicz makes Sylwia’s determination to hold on to Kuba, even when she knows he’s gay, unhappily believable too.   At the end, Kuba is massaging Sylwia in the bath, rather than Ewa from beside it, but Wasilewski manoeuvres the couple into these final pictures of proximity and separateness by clumsy means.  I assumed that Sylwia’s claim that she’s pregnant with Kuba’s child was true but I didn’t understand why, when Ewa demands that he therefore stay put with her and Sylwia, Kuba was bound to capitulate and to tell Michal their relationship was over.  (It feels like a copout that Kuba doesn’t find out what happens to Michal.)  I understood even less why the mother would see this as a way of holding on to her son – when it also guarantees that Sylwia, who Ewa’s wanted rid of from the start, remains part of the household.

    Poland is a variously successful sporting nation but you don’t think of it as a producer of swimming talent.  (There’s been just one Polish Olympic gold medallist in the pool in the last century.)   Since Kuba not only drinks but smokes cigarettes as well as soft drugs, you feel you understand why.   Wasilewski is negligent in constructing the sporting world of the film, in spite of its importance in the protagonist’s life (he’s been training at the pool since he was a young child).   The coaches say vague things like, to a group including Kuba, ‘Only one of you will go forward’ and you wonder to what.  There’s never any conversation among the swimmers and no reaction, other than in a brief follow-up conversation with a coach, to Kuba’s packing in a crucial race when leading it.  The title has nothing to do with the swimming pool but refers to something Michal did as a child – as his father reminds him shortly before his son is murdered.  The boy used to look out of the windows of the family home up at the tall buildings outside, narrowing his eyes until the image went blurry and they became ‘floating skyscrapers’.  The film’s certificate draws attention to ‘strong sex and nudity’ and there’s a fair amount of both but there’s no warning that you’ll see a man being beaten graphically to death.

    10 December 2013

     

Posts navigation