Plot
As an aging woman married to a workaholic doctor by chance meets a young man who makes her feel young again. All of this is films by a director making a film about her which cuts in and out of the on camera and off camera drama.
Release Year: 2009
Rating: 6.5/10 (543 voted)
Director:
Andrzej Wajda
Stars: Krystyna Janda, Pawel Szajda, Jan Englert
Storyline As an aging woman married to a workaholic doctor by chance meets a young man who makes her feel young again. All of this is films by a director making a film about her which cuts in and out of the on camera and off camera drama.
Writers: Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Krystyna Janda
Cast: Krystyna Janda
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Marta
/
Krystyna Janda
Pawel Szajda
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Bogus
Jan Englert
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Doctor
Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak
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Marta's Friend
Julia Pietrucha
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Halinka
Roma Gasiorowska
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Janitor
Krzysztof Skonieczny
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Stasiek
Pawel Tomaszewski
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Bridge Player #1
Mateusz Kosciukiewicz
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Bridge Player #2
Marcin Luczak
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Bridge Player #3
Marcin Korcz
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Maciej Kowalik
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Jerzy Mizak
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Marcin Starzecki
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Andrzej Wajda
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Himself
Runtime:
Germany:
(Berlin International Film Festival)
Did You Know?
Trivia:
The film is dedicated to the late cinematographer Edward Klosinski, the husband of actress "Krystyna Janda" and one of Andrzej Wajda's closest collaborators. Klosinski died during filming and his wife decided to include in the movie her personally written monologue on his loss, which actually refers to the very subject of the film.
User Review
Touching and poetic memorial
Rating: 10/10
First off the English name of the title is a little misleading, it does
not regard the effect of consuming sugar, it's referring to plants that
grow by the riverside. But don't worry it's still good! It is a film
within a film, although the purpose here is not so much a treatise on
film making. The inner film is based on Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz's short
story Tatarak. This concerns a melancholic doctor's wife Marta, living
a slow-paced life in iron curtain Poland, I think the story is set
around 1960. It is a very short story, the movie is only 85 minutes
long, and half of it is the film outside the film. Marta has a measure
of survivor syndrome following the war, and misses having young people
around the house, and so strikes up a relationship with a sweet young
working class man called Bogus, who is the boyfriend of a girl who sees
herself as superior because she is a university student. She is
pressurising him to be more than he is, and so his rendezvous with
Marta is an escape for him too.
One of my favourite shots in terms of pure image craft in the movie is
in the dining room of Marta's house, the set table is covered over in a
white table-cloth (a formality of a bygone era?), and is reflected in a
large ornate mirror on the back wall which tilts out at an angle as it
is hung like a picture. This throws the image of the table so that it
takes up almost the entire mirror, and it somehow is surrounded only in
darkness, you cannot see any of the rest of the room. It is a shot that
reminds me of the existential fragility of many of the old still life
paintings for example of Adriaen Coorte.
The plant in question is more commonly known as Calamus or Sweet Flag.
It has two quite different odours, the root is pungent whilst the blade
is more sweet smelling. This is a metaphor for the transitory nature of
happiness in the movie, the root is death, the blade is life. The
rendezvous take place among the sweet rushes. The Greeks had a story
for the origin of the rush, told in Nonnus's Dionysiaca, where, upon
the drowning of his lover during a swimming race in the river, Calamus
drowned himself in sympathy and turned into a sweet rush. So the
soughing of the wind in the rushes is a lament.
Krystyna Janda, who plays Marta in the film, was married to Wajda's
frequent collaborator cinematographer Edward Klosinski. He had a rather
nasty cancer during the filming of Tatarak, and died. The film then
becomes at some level a memorial for him. We see how the grief of the
cancer infused Krystyna during the performance. We also see her deliver
a monologue regarding her experiences with her husband around the time
of his death, which are very sad. Mostly she is in a spartan room,
delivering a monologue, but also we see her sometimes on set of the
film, before or after shooting, and once, heartbreakingly in the rain.
Tatarak won the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, the
award is "given to a movie which opens new perspectives in film art".
Well that is exactly what this movie does. You can scarcely watch a
better film.
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