QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM MOTELX
It begins impressionistically, in the dark. A face, barely visible at all, emerges from the shadows, and then we see more faces, more clearly, as a small clan gathers around blazing flames to bear witness to the fiery immolation of their materfamilias. One of those faces belongs to little Nawojka, the only daughter, who declares in voiceover, “The evil was in her. It is now in me too”. This introduces us to a female legacy of witchcraft – or perhaps of scapegoating – as women’s power is something that tradition holds should be condemned and collectively punished. These are the themes that will be played out at length in Julia Kowalski’s Her Will Be Done – whose original French title Que Ma Volonté Soit Faite or “my will be done“ (a phrase reappropriated from the Bible for use in Satanic rituals whose human participants assume God’s power for themselves) has in its English version also been overtly feminised.
Some years later, Nawojka (Maria Wróbel) is an adolescent still living with her father Henryk (Wojciech Skibiński) and her older brothers Bogdan (Kuba Dyniewicz) and Tomek (Przemyslaw Przestrzelski) on their cattle farm. They are strangers in a strange land – a Polish family who have emigrated to a small French village – and Nowojka is even more estranged as the only woman in an otherwise all-male clan, and as a daughter seemingly damned to the demonic influence of her departed mother. At Henryk’s insistence, she prays every night at a candlelit altar – but also, in her bed, she convulses, speaks in a strange voice, and has vision-like dreams of horrors to come. She is awkward, and anxious, and concerned about her future, even as her hopes to take on a scholarship at a distant veterinarian school – perhaps a deliberate echo of Julia Ducournau’s similarly themed Raw (2016) – are being weighed by a father who needs her at home. Who else, after all, will do her farm work, as well as all the men’s cooking and cleaning?
Into this repressive environment of machismo and male attention (often unwanted) comes Sandra (Roxane Mesquida), reluctantly returning to the village. This free-spirited young woman with her blonde-and-pink hair, her hot pants and her very own car represents a more liberated model of femininity – yet she too, having long since seen the place’s rot and got out when she could, struggles fully to escape her history. For she has been drawn back to clear out and sell off her late parents’ house, and is now, once again, having to fend off the leering eyes (and other parts) of the menfolk and the hateful resentment of other local women, even as her difficulty in moving on is literalised by a vicious scar on her leg that has her limping in a brace. The trauma of her past in this village and its ingrained culture have never fully let her go. Henryk also limps and walks with a crutch – and he, as both a genuinely decent, caring man and the nominal patriarch in this most patriarchal of systems, is similarly incapable of escaping the shackles that society has placed upon him. Everyone here is trapped – which leaves us equally willing Nawojka’s escape, while uncertain what better place there is to which she might go. After all, this little village is a microcosm and a metaphor for a wider world of Christian, heteronormative values, where a good woman is expected to marry a local man and become like his cattle.
Like Tereza Nvotová’s Nightsiren (2022), Her Will Be Done uses witchery as a feminist frame to explore otherness and alienation in a small, superstitious town which, with its heavy drinking, nocturnal hunts, casual rape and Kafka-esque entrapment, offers a woman’s response to Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971). This community is all too ready to blame the innocent, to execute witch hunts, and to burn the evidence of its own sins. As the livestock are afflicted with a mysterious plague, and destructive paranoia sets in, genre elements (demonic rituals, possession, irrational rape revenge) are introduced to suggest a subversive feminine force running through and against the village’s Christian conformity, and guiding Nawojka’s difficult emergence into adulthood. Her coming of age and increasing empowerment are articulated through the sacrifices of a sisterhood that transcends family or country – and ultimately Nawojka bares herself, with Godiva-like defiance, not only to the shamed denizens of her adopted and now abandoned home, but also to the light. For she has transformed, without sex or the intervention of any man, into a woman, and will now pursue her own path.
In the Q&A after the film, Kowalski revealed that she too belongs to a Polish family moved to France, with two brothers of her own, and that as a rebellious teen, she was a practising witch – and yet she insists that the film, though informed by parts of her life experience, is not autobiographical. Her Will Be Done is dedicated to Kowalski’s mother, and is concerned, precisely, with the feminine power that flows from mother to daughter, as an insidious counterpoint to the pervasive patriarchy.
Her Will Be Done showed during the 19th edition of MOTELX, in Lisbon.
