British thirty-plus-somethings will remember a long-running series of TV ads for the 1970s' closest approximation to wholemeal bread. One beheld, to the accompaniment of Dvorak's New World symphony wheezed out by a colliery band, a long-lost Northern working-class Eden -- cobbled streets shiny with recent rain, smudge-nosed, tousle-haired urchins in oversized flat caps, that kind of thing. All bathed in a rich golden glow, the still air scintillating with motes of dust (or possibly flour). Imagine "Brassed Off" shot by the cinematographer of "Elvira Madigan" and you get the picture.
It seems unlikely that the makers of "Nic" ("Nothing") had that oeuvre at the forefront of their minds when they made this film, if only because its risibility might have stayed their hands with the Golden Syrup. Alas, the sticky stuff is ladled on by the enamel bucketload. Every face is haloed in golden backlit hair; every speck of dust floats in one shaft of sunlight or another; and, yes, every cobble glistens.
We find ourselves in some (inexplicably -- unless perhaps for budgetary reasons -- depopulated) generic mid-European urban landscape, at some unascertainable date between the 1890s and the 1990s, where everything not coated in peeling stucco or chipped enamel is, basically, made of bakelite. The atmosphere is not so much dreamy as catatonic. There is an awful lot of extreme close-up (generally in profile, so that whispy strands of blond hair may catch the light to best advantage) and a certain amount of artfully composed long-shot (De Chirico meets Cartier-Bresson), but not a lot in between. The result is that nothing is ever placed -- visually, narratively or morally -- in any coherent context. Perhaps the intention was to convey, subjectively, the wretched (although inappropriately gorgeous) heroine's sense of oppression; but the result is simply oppressive.
The sad thing about this sad film, clearly made with the best of intentions, is that it is, says the director, based on a true story, recently reported in the Polish press, of just such a young woman, desperately concealing her advancing pregnancy from her brutish husband, doing away with the infant and standing trial for murder. Of course, that is in one sense a timeless story -- it has been replayed in every society through the ages. The fatal mistake here is to have decided that "timelessness" is the point, and to try to convey that literally; instead of focussing on the specific, and locating a heartbreaking tale in the real world of lived experience. So we drift in Never-Never Land -- which might do for fables or dreary old Magic Realism, but hardly cuts the mustard when it comes to the real pain of real human beings. In the end, we are neither drawn in to empathise (a la Ken Loach) nor challenged, by deliberate alienation, to make up our own minds (a la Bresson). Though, doubtless, the last thing the director intended, the film shrugs its shoulders fatalistically and settles for maudlin -- and ultimately callous -- platitudes about The Human Condition, instead of asking hard questions about how such things come to happen, in a time and a place, and how it feels to be caught up in them. What we have here, to be blunt, is the Hallmark Cards school of film-making, depressingly tricked out as "art" cinema.
Seemingly anxious to leave behind the grimy, grainy world of the Communist era, and to come out from under the shadow of giants like Kieslowski (whom one imagines telling just such a tale with unflinching and shattering directness), the makers of "Nic" have ended up, sad to say, throwing out the Realist baby with the Socialist bathwater. Ironically, the result, with its portentous calendar artiness, is unsettlingly reminiscent of upmarket totalitarian kitsch. These days, that won't even shift bread.
