QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM SAN SEBASTIAN
Kasia Adamik’s fourth feature film was written by the Polish director herself, alongside Polish screenwriter Sandra Buchta and British playwright Lucinda Coxon, and it is based on Polish Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s short story Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw. In other words, this is a solidly Polish and female-led affair. Winter of the Crow takes place on December 13th 1981, and the few days that followed. That’s when the Soviet-backed Polish government imposed martial law on the Eastern European nation in order to stifle the burgeoning opposition, in particular the Lech Wałęsa-aligned Solidarity movement.
Dr. Joan Andrews (Lesley Manville, who received an Oscar nod in 2018 for her role in the Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread) is a British academic whose research focuses on the sectioning and sedating of psychiatric patients. She became a famous writer and a champion of the anti-psychiatry movement after seeing her own mother perish in a mental asylum. She travels to Warsaw for a conference, after being invited by Alina (Zofia Wichłacz), a young academic and activist, who also happens to be a big fan of Dr. Andrews’s work. To the dismay of the reserved British woman, the university students have little interest in her lecture, instead making a mockery of it. They are more concerned with the democratisation of Poland, still under the iron fist of their Soviet neighbours. She insists that her work has no political connotation, and that this is not her fight.
The government unexpectedly declares martial law. Dr. Andrews’s is left to fend for herself without knowing a single word in Polish. She has nno passport and o luggage, and she isn’t even sure of what happened to her hostess (one of the very few people who have command of the language of Shakespeare in the film). She sets out to find the British Embassy so that she can safely return home. She witnesses a shocking murder, just before she finds out that borders are shut, the telephone lines cut, and a strict curfew has been imposed. She registers the developments with a trusted Polaroid camera. The technology is unfamiliar to Poles; Alina is particularly impressed with the flashy device.
Winter of the Crow combines elements of horror and political thriller to mostly effective results. The bleak concrete blocks of suburban Warsaw, the heavy snow and the empty streets make the perfect scenario for danger and isolation. Tomasz Naumiuk’s sombre and accurate cinematography enraptures and impresses. Crows fly over the sky of the desolate city, appear in paintings, knock on Dr. Andrews’s window, and even feature in her nightmares. Alina explains to her British friend that the crow has yet another meaning: the Polish word for the bird (“wrona”) is associated with a dangerous politician (in fact, the military junta running Poland during the period of martial law was called “Wron”). A desperate Dr. Andrews has to knock on the doors of Alina’s neighbours and run down the slippery streets with the flimsy shoes and coat you’d wear during a mild London winter. Successive twists keep viewers engaged with the story, until it comes a satisfactory resolution
Our helpless protagonist deserves empathy but also a reprimand. While her helplessness and anger are entirely justified, her lack of solidarity with the locals is less commendable. Alina is the first one to hint at her elitism and selfishness: “you have a toothbrush, and that’s more than most people in here”. Dr. Andrews’s refusal to cooperate with the persecuted activists is also morally reprehensible. But that could change. It is alleged that her Polaroid pictures could help “to change history”. Maybe she could be persuaded to take some action. That is, if she survives the ordeal and ever makes it back to London.
Tom Burke makes a brief appearance as the British ambassador. Foreign diplomats have very limited powers and a somewhat ambiguous agenda under such extreme circumstances, the film seems to suggest.
Other than its detestation of communism, Winter of the Crow is not a very political. Instead, it uses politics as a narrative device. The story is less concerned with geopolitical contextualisation than with the adrenaline-inducing developments. It barely acknowledges when the action takes place, while also failing to clarify that the martial law would last nearly two years (in ended in July 1983), claiming 92 casualties and thousands of political arrests. The communists rule in Poland fell in 1989, and Wałęsa became the country’s president the following year (also something Winter of the Crow fails to explain). In other words: Winter of the Crow is more entertainment and enlightenment.
Winter of the Crow is the closing film of the 73rd San Sebastian International Film Festival.
