Wenecja (Venice)

Wenecja (Venice) (Director: Jan Jakub Kolski): Based on either a novel or a series of short stories by Włodzimierz Odojewski (I can’t seem to find out which), Wenecja’s reach exceeds its grasp in the end, but it’s a feast for the senses non­ethe­less. It begins with a tan­tal­izing syn­opsis: 11-year-old Marek is the child of aris­to­cratic par­ents. Although everyone else in his family has seen Venice, he has yet to have the exper­i­ence, and it’s become a bit of an obses­sion for him. Unfortunately, the out­break of war in 1939 dashes his plans, for Venice and a whole lot more. He is sent to stay with his aunt at the family’s old manor house in the country, where a motley col­lec­tion of female cousins and other aunts has assembled, along with his grand­mother. His father and older brother have gone off to fight, while his spoiled mother claims to have been called up by the White Cross, a relief organ­iz­a­tion, but has instead run off with one of her lovers. When the manor house’s base­ment is flooded one night during a storm, Marek and his aunts decide to recreate the canals of Venice. It’s a powerful piece of ima­gin­a­tion and a defence mech­anism against the encroaching viol­ence of the German invasion.

But as the film con­tinues to add poten­tially inter­esting char­ac­ters, it becomes evident that it’s not quite the coming-of-age story that we expected. Although there are bits of romance with Marek and his female cousins and the young maid, he brushes them off, retreating instead to the base­ment where he repeats “I don’t want to be here” like an encant­a­tion. The film then fol­lows some of the other char­ac­ters, including Marek’s mother and her sis­ters, each of whom has a poten­tially inter­esting back­story. There is also the local Jewish family, whom the film is at great pains to point out are treated very well by the aris­to­crats. Marek’s brother Victor turns up after a while, but his char­acter isn’t really explored, even when Marek fol­lows him one day on one of his mys­ter­ious excursions.

Wenecja seems to want us to mourn the passing away of the Polish aris­to­cratic class even as their suf­fering seems more like incon­veni­ence. Anyone familiar with European his­tory will know that most Poles were suf­fering far more than this family, and that thought clouds any good­will we may develop toward this group of refined and attractive people. It doesn’t help that the cine­ma­to­graphy is uni­formly gor­geous, making even the one attempt at grit (a German fighter plane strafing a column of Polish troops) an exer­cise in high style instead.

When the family’s hideout is finally dis­covered by the Germans, it’s their good for­tune that the sol­diers are part of a pro­pa­ganda unit, who film their mock-Venetian car­nival and then go away. While there’s a sense of fore­boding after­ward, the film ends abruptly by skip­ping ahead to the end of the war, and showing us not Marek but another char­acter. It’s a con­clu­sion that’s both con­fusing and unsatisfying.

I got the sense that Kolski’s film could have gone on in sev­eral dir­ec­tions. There were more than enough inter­esting char­ac­ters and plot­lines intro­duced. Instead, the film leaves us hanging, wishing for more. Though many of the images in Wenecja are unfor­get­table, in the end it is only a beau­tiful fantasy, cov­ering over the ugly reality of what was going on else­where in Poland. Thus it fails to have the sort of emo­tional impact that it should, which is a real pity.

Facebook page for the film

(7/10)

Tagged as: #mwff10, poland, ww2