Kamil Krawczycki | Mój koniec swiata (The End of My World) / 2017

dirge for a lost lover

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kamil Krawczycki (screenwriter and director) Mój koniec swiata (The End of My World) / 2017 [30 minutes]

 

This rather lugubrious and portentous, but nonetheless beautifully filmed short work by Polish director Kamil Krawczycki could be described as a dirge for a lost lover. Eryk (Pawel Dobek) has left his lover of six years Filip (Bartlomiej Ostrowski) without a trace, and Filip is unable to view it as anything other than the end of his world.

     Moodily tottering at the edge of his apartment building roof, drinking heavily, and behaving short-temperedly with his lesbian friends Ola (Magdalena Kaczmarek) and Daria (Lena Schimscheiner), the handsome youthful-looking, middle-aged photographer can’t seem to shake himself out of his stupor—that is until on a rainy day he meets Janek (Karol Kubasiewicz), a much younger man, who seeks refuge inside his apartment building’s doorway. Within moments Filip, on his way to a commercial shoot, invites the young man to audition for the role.

     If Filip can be said to represent the current mood of Polish intellectuals, despondent about their own lives and yet hopeful for the changes they imagine their country is undergoing, Janek signifies the new generations’ belief that, given the situation at hand, they are better off picking up what they have left and moving onto new worlds—an attitude Filip clearly envies.

     Although Filip remains almost speechless throughout their flirtatious interchanges, the two do get together for a sexual fling, but even a one-night stand turns into a reminder of all that Filip has lost, and the event ends with Janek’s quick leave-taking.

    It is not even that Filip and his ex-lover were particularly happy together, as Filip tells his mother (Katarzyna Herman) at a posh gallery opening for his newest photographs. They had been fighting off-and-on for the past several years, yet he cannot release himself from the deep sexual desire that existed between the two of them. And evidently neither can Eryk, who suddenly shows up, explaining that his silence was an attempt to simply be sure that he could survive their separation.

   The two have passionate sex in the car in which they meet up. But it is now also clear that the relationship between them is over.

   Filip, we perceive, has everything—a good job, the acceptance of his sexuality by his family, financial security, and prestige—that young men such as Janek will perhaps never have given Poland’s current attitudes and leadership. Yet Filip stews in his sexual stupor. But when the doorbell rings, it is clear that he hopes it might be Janek returning for another visit.

     If this short work might be described as failing in its narrative, it succeeds quite brilliantly in its aural and cinematic effects. The director’s new feature film, Elephant (2022), which won the Iris prize, has just been sold to TLA Releasing in the US, England, and Canada, and I look forward to seeing how Krawczycki’s talent has developed.

 

Los Angeles, March 20, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).