table
by Douglas
Messerli
Jenifer
Malmqvist (screenwriter and director) Na koncu ulicy (At the End of
the Street) / 2007 [14 minutes]
Directed by the Swedish born Jenifer Malmqvist who studied filmmaking in Poland, this Polish-language film features a woman, Aleksandra (Ela Komorowska) angrily trudging through the city streets to visit her former lover, Monika (Joanna Glen).
She
is stopped by a local policeman (Mikolaj Osiński) and fined for crossing a crosswalk
against the light. He tries to explain that the small fee surely is worth
possibly saving her life.
But so focused is Aleksandra about her
hurt, anger, and most of all the pain of having lost her lover, that it hardly
seems to register. She arrives at her former apartment and calls up to Monika,
who refuses to come down even for a few moments to talk with her.
Aleksandra insists she will simply wait in the middle of the street until Monika does come down, and she lays down in the middle of road, but to no avail.
We soon see her putting her old key into
the lock and tip-toeing into the apartment where Monika is celebrating her new novel
with friends, including her new lover, Dziewczyna Moniki (Masza Steczek), the
two of them regularly exchanging kisses.
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From around a corner, Aleksandra watches
the affair, becoming more hurt and infuriated by the moment. Finally she
reveals herself, Monika explaining once again that she cannot talk to her at
this time. “As you can see, I am busy.”
Aleksandra insists that she has come to
claim some more of her belongings, by Monika reminds her that she has long ago
removed everything from the apartment. But the very table in which Monika and
her friends are dining evidently also belongs to Aleksandra and she demands it
back.
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In the
hall where Aleksandra waits, Monika comes to her, attempting to calm her down
with a kiss. But the table soon is delivered up, and Aleksandra drags it out
onto the streets and begins to clumsily pull it back in the direction from
where she has begun her visit of revenge.
The policeman, now in an auto, stops,
asking if she needs help. She refuses, suggesting all that she needs is a
drink. He stops the car, gets out, opens his trunk, and pulls out a bottle of
beer which he hands her, and she begins to swill down.
Noticing votive candles and flowers in the trunk, Aleksandra wonders if he had been visiting the cemetery, the policeman replaying he had intended to, but it closed before he could. His wife died six years ago, he explains, at the end of the street, hit by a car.
The two are now brought together by loss,
and he attempts to pull legs off the table in order to place it into the trunk
in order to help her get it home. But the legs, which she affixed, seem unmovable,
and before long, these two lonely individuals standing closely next to each
other, fall into a series of shy kisses.
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When he attempts to get more serious, however,
she hits him hard, wandering off in the director of his wife’s death. However,
she soon returns, apologizing, explaining that she misses her lover so very
much.
She asks if the place where she hit him
still hurts, and he scoffs it off. She is ready to leave, and he asks about the
table. “You can have it,” she answers, leaving the car and walking off.
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A few seconds later, the policeman
drives off in the other director, the table remaining on the side of the road
where the two have left it, symbol of how both their communal lives have been
turned over by the loss of their loved ones.
Malmqvist’s work is a gritty testimony to
Beckett’s oft-quoted phrase, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
Los
Angeles, January 13, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January
2025).
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