Philip James McGoldrick | Siemiany / 2009

 agnieszka’s breasts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philip James McGoldrick (screenwriter and director) Siemiany / 2009 [19 minutes]

 

Siemiany is a Polish summer resort village in the countryside where each year two teenagers, Andrzej (Damian Ul) and Michal (Michal Wlodarczyk), along with their families, have visited. The two boys, like most pre-adolescent teens, wrestle, swim, fish, wrestle some more, challenge each other with sexual knowledge about women—particularly of their female friend Agnieszka (Aleksandra Radwanska) who years before has shown them her budding breasts—wrestle again, and generally just hang out with one another. Occasionally they show one another their hard-ons, the result, so they claim of thinking of Agnieszka’s breasts.

     This year begins very much like their years of the past. But something is different. One of their brothers has joined a sort of gang of whom he is the leader and with whom Agnieszka, now much taller and older hangs out. Her goal when she grows up, she tells the camera, is to become a slut. The group mostly bullies their own members and occasionally shows its clout to the younger boys, particularly when the brother pulls out his newly-purchased gun—fortunately unloaded, but later filled with bullets.

      Basically, however, the boys seek to maintain their usual activities. But it’s more difficult this year without Agnieszka, and there is a growing distance between the slower maturing of the two Andrzej and meaner and growing-up Michal. Michal seems only half interested in his friend and it is not all interested any longer in seeing his friend’s dick, although at one point Michal suddenly demands to see Andrzej’s penis, grabbing him and pushing him up against the wall in what almost becomes a rape. They still sleep in the same bed and enjoy one another’s company, but Michal’s language has become tougher while Andrzej’s imitations seem only half-hearted, although they are both hated for their bluff of verbal abuse by the locals.

      One day, Michal goes missing as he explores the room of another girl, the beautiful Dorota (Joanna Opozda) who has already joked to the camera—in one of the film’s misguided post-modern interpolations—“I don’t say much in this film, I just lay here.” But when Michal goes exploring she does far more than that, slowly engaging him as she shows off her body, little by little, flirting and toying with the wide-eyed and astounded youth perhaps on the edge of his first heterosexual adventure.

       Meanwhile, outside the white headed, dyed blonde crowd of older boys decide to grab and slightly abuse Andrzej, describing his as a faggot for his longer, undyed locks. They are determined to “make him a man” by dying his hair the same blonde-white as their own heads. I am not sure what this ritual means in Polish culture, but it clearly an attempt to pull someone of difference into their orbit. Making him look like them clearly frees him from any sense of difference.

    Having undergone the ordeal, and now with a bleached white crop of unwashed hair, the boy goes in search of his friend, surely confused and perhaps frightened. But as he seeks him out in the inside of the cottage, he quietly becomes a voyeur to the sexual “coming out” of Michal, watching for an instant as Dorota undresses for his friend.    

    In the next instant we see Andrzej once more outside on the run, racing down a long empty path, escaping what he cannot comprehend but clearly senses, that he has lost his friend forever to a world that perhaps he can never enter. The difference the older boys simply joked about may in fact be real, and Andrej is obviously terrified by its implications.

       Andrej suffers the feelings of so very many gay boys, that he has somehow missed out in the “normal” process of male maturation, realizing that his pretend interest in Agnieszka was just that; that in wanting to display his hard-on it was Michal who was his focus, the erection the result of his friend’s touch, not some imaginary memory of Agnieszka’s breasts.

 

Los Angeles, April 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).