Cycle index

Family Life

dir. Krzysztof Zanussi / Poland 1971 / 88’

subtitles: English

retrospective: Krzysztof Zanussi A Plane from Budapest, Anxiety, Attestation, Behind the Wall, Camouflage, Cement and Words, Face to Face, Family Life, Girl and Uhlan, Hipothesis, Holden, Illumination, Imperative, In Full Gallop, Inventory, Krzysztof Zanussi – Essential Conversations, Life As a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease, Long Conversation with a Bird, Mountains at Dusk, Persona non grata, Revisit, Spiral, Stop Thief, Students, The Balance, The Bluebeard, The Catamount Killing, The Constant Factor, The Contract, The Death of a Provincial, The Lady with the Ermine, The Lame Devil, The Power of Evil, The Role, The Roof, The Silent Touch, The Structure of Crystal, The Tram to Heaven, The Unapproachable, The Year of Quiet Sun, Time That Passed, Umbrella, Ways in the Night, Wherever You Are, With a Warm Heart, A Woman’s Business, Deceptive Charm Section index

Cast

Daniel Olbrychski, Jan Kreczmar, Halina Mikołajska, Maja Komorowska, Jan Nowicki, Anna Milewska

Film description

Confrontation between a technocrat son and his father, a pre-war industrialist, serves here as a pretext for reflection on the culture Polish intelligentsia. Family Life is a picturesque, powerful depiction of a bourgeois family with pre-war industrial traditions. A villa in Warsaw with an overgrown garden probably with earlier pretensions of being a mansion, but has deteriorated since then - this is the home of a young engineer, Wit, who works in Silesia with a great deal of success. The household consists of a despotic father, a bored aunt, an eccentric sister (the first and excellent role of the director's muse - Maja Komorowska) and a giant dog whose name - Caligari - demonstrates its owners' true love of cinema. Wit's friend, Marek, is an active observer of this family psychodrama. As Zanussi himself suggests, the figure of the father and his relationship with his son are set in an autobiographical context: I cannot hide that Family Life is my attempt to argue with my father; of course it is disguised in an entirely different anecdote but there are plenty of allusions to various conflicts between us. Seen more broadly, the film is a universal treatise on the heritage brought from one's family, which can be of value, but a burden too.Whether you accept it or deny it, you cannot get rid of it.

Mirella Napolska