Cycle index

Weekend Stories

111’

subtitles: Polish and 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

Films description

Deceptive Charm

Poland 1996 / 55’

A Woman’s Business

Poland 1996 / 56’

The credits of The Weekend Stories are a subtle reference to a famous TV film of the 1970s - Behind the Wall (the starting frame always shows a view from a window). But this is an entirely different cinema. This series of medium-length TV features was called by Zanussi a kind of organic work and an attempt at artistic compromise, in which the author tries to remain truthful to his own language and yet to reach out to lazy-minded viewers in their homes....I waived sophisticated forms and tried to present serious reflections in the most simple and entertaining way, speaking to as broad an audience as possible, ranging my works somewhere between the old-day The Slave Isaura and modern Klan - wrote the director in his autobiography Time to Die. The series comprises parables with a moral and the style is close to the 'zero-style cinema'. The parables depict young and middle-aged intellectuals, whose honesty and resistance to the material world's temptations is tested in various ways.

In Deceptive Charm a homosexual count offers a young talented scientist, frustrated with his earnings, employment on somewhat ambiguous terms.A weekend job, planned as easy money, changes into a risky game. The characters' relations resemble the Faustian situation in Camouflage (especially with Zapasiewicz cast as the count).

A Woman's Business speaks of divisions and harms originating in the communist Poland when a clerk's maliciousness - retaining a passport, for instance - could ruin someone's personal life. Former Solidarity activists cannot stand idle watching the former party official as a triumphant businesswoman.

Mirella Napolska