Pregi (The Welts)

17:00
27 Oktober 2007
Europe on Screen 2007

Free ticket available 30 min before opening


Centre Culturel Francais (CCF) - Capacity: 43 seats
Jl. Salemba Raya 25 - T 390 8585, 390 8580

Still
Lucky Kuswandi, 2005, 15 min.
Indonesia, Fiction

The Welts
Magdalena Piekorz, 2004, 91 min.
Poland, Drama, Polish with English subtitles.
Poland's 2005 Oscar submission, the beauty and moral weightiness of the golden age of Polish cinema.

In some ways, Magdalena Piekorz's The Welts isn't much different from The Holy Girl and other films by female directors Jones cites in his review—like Claire Denis's L'Intrus and Chantal Akerman's Demain on démenage—in its unmistakable stubbornness, except the film doesn't so much adhere to private rules or logic but to the dictates of stick-it-to-daddy melodramas like Shine, Swimming Upstream, and Affliction, and if I didn't know The Welts was adapted from the stories of Wojciech Kuczok, I would have gathered that the whole experience of making the film was an exorcism for the director.

To its credit, I can't think of another film so perfectly split in half: The first half of the film (the story of a boy and his horrible relationship to his abusive father) and the second (how that boy becomes exactly like his father and how his rage gets in the way of everything he does) evoke the pages of a book pressed so tightly together that the ink from one side has left an imprint on the other.

As for the image that divides the two parts (a close-up of the adult Wojtek, played by Micha Ebrowski, looking into a bathroom mirror), it's like the glue that bonds these two halves. Which is to say that the film, true to its title, understands the impression the past leaves on the present.
Piekorz's incredible flair for contrast is all over two shots wherein pigeons evoke the relationship of the main character to the world around him, but in spite of The Welts' formalist rigor and attention to the honesty of the relationship between abuser and abused, the film talks down to its audience.
Like the overpraised Affliction, it strains to trace the sins of the father in the sins the son: Like the toothache that plagues Nick Notle in the Paul Schrader film, it's as if Ebrowski's Wojtek never knew he was like his father until the day he catches himself brushing his teeth until his gums bleed.
And if the main character's narration makes for poetic self-reflection, it's not a loveliness that's matched by the one female character in the film, Tania (Agnieszka Grochowska), who exists only to play the role of psychologist and savior.
Grochowska is a fierce performer, but she's scarcely the type that lives only to save broken men. Martel, and Jones for that matter, wouldn't be pleased. - Ed Gonzalez | © slant magazine, 2005. [Picture: slant magazine]


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