By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 5 cats
Director: Anka Sasnal | Wilhelm Sasnai
Starring: Agnieszka Podsiadli | Dawid Wolski | Elzbieta Okupska | Jerzy Lapinski | Marcin Czarnik | Piotr Nowak
Original language title: Z daleka widok jest piekny
Country: poland
Year: 2012
Running time: 77
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2114410/
Bruce says: “****SPOILERS****
“This seems to be the season for wonderful, beautifully made films that cannot be recommended for everyone. Sparse in dialogue IT LOOKS PRETTY FROM A DISTANCE brings to mind disparate fare such as HUKKLE; GOODBYE, DRAGON INN; and THE TURIN HORSE. Imagine photographs in the spirit of Dorthea Lange and Walker Evans brought to life in modern Poland. IT LOOKS PRETTY FROM A DISTANCE is a film that can best be appreciated by those who have knowledge of Polish history, without which little will make sense in this very oblique picture of the underclass in a remote Polish village.
“The filmmaking team of Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal are husband and wife artists, world famous in modern art circles for painting and drawing respectively. Their intent is to create ideas through images. Here they employ the freedom of painting in their film using extreme angles, low horizontal lines and lingering shots. Visually the film is stunning from start to finish.
“There is much we never know about the people in the film. What we do know is that there are two neighboring families, and the daughter of one is involved with the son of the other. The son and his father have a junk business which has overrun all areas around the dilapidated cement block home where they live, a junkyard sculpture park. The mother has dementia and is hell bent on escaping but who could blame her; she has probably felt that way her entire life. By now she has earned the right to behave
irrationally. At one point she stands in the open window and lets go with a sound that is a hybrid of a bleat and a honk; it is piercing.
“Once the old lady is gone and the menfolk are off on an extended scrap metal selling trip, the girl next door comes over to scrub the house down. Her father comes to get her and says, ‘Come home. Stop working on someone else’s property.’ She replies, ‘It’ll be mine.’ But that is unlikely to happen. The villagers congregate on the property and suddenly dismantle the house. Bulldozing the property becomes a community event. Dogs in the village are poisoned. None of this action is even partially explained. Nor are the killings that happen later. The best explanation lies in an abstract scene, an overhead shot of clothes in a washing machine. The machine first pulls them to the right, then agitates; then to the left, agitates. That is the tragedy of Poland. Abstract. Intangible. Mysterious. 5 cats
“(IT LOOKS PRETTY FROM A DISTANCE screened at the 2012 New Directors/New Films Festival jointly sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art.)”