[CRITICAL] UNITED STATES OF LOVE

Tomasz Wasilewski is a portrait of women that the desire to desire to consume, it kills small fire, and die in a world governed by the invective that what they have already should be enough.

A total work of art, and dense, it is in these terms that it would be fair to set the third film of the Polish director Tomas Wasilewski (after In a bedroom in 2012 and water Line in 2014), for which he won the silver Bear for Best script at the Berlin film festival 2016. In effect, the UNITED STATES OF LOVE is a film tightrope walker who manages to find a balance point gloss between a subject and an aesthetic. It combines a high scenario and a realization that inhabited that make it a film that marks deeply the mind and that, without upsetting, shall convene a deep reflection. With a real appetite for the exercise of ultra-visual, a ” paw ” singular, and also more superficially for its physical resemblance, the writer-director Tomas Wasilewski seems to be clearly at the height of the soft nickname of “ Xavier Dolan Polish , to which he leaves, and it understands, willingly crowned.

Poland, 1990. After the fall of the Berlin wall, four women have the crazy hope that the liberation of the country is their own. But the right of a catholic successor to communism; the feminist thought that the old regime called “aberration of intellectual” again underwent a straitjacket. It is the turn of a piety, sovereign and endimanchée of grip still and always the women-now more than ever in the roles of good wives, or women of bad life. The hope of fulfillment is futile, the Poland of the 90’s, this is not yet the United States of America. Yet in turn, each will try to win the freedom to love, the right to happiness, or just to be oneself.

Under the false air of a choral film, Tomasz Wasilewski achieves in reality with UNITED STATES OF LOVE, a chronicle of the passing of time in which the prism policy is only a smart funnel to get closer to the true nature of the prison of women : their body.

Marzena Agata, Iza and Renata, respectively 30, 40, 50 and 60 years of age, four female characters as the red thread of the narrative which the director uses to expose for decades, the power of desire from a woman – of women-through the ages of his life. It sets the scene by episode four “moments” of existence, through which he provides a portrait of strong and fascinating female flesh, its skin is robbed of its ability under-estimated, ridiculed and underground, has powerfully ignite.

“United States Of Love story of the pure expression of Humanity of which one deprives the women” Click to tweet

Marzena is a young fitness teacher, his job is to teach others to tame their body. She is beautiful. However, she is forced to be celibate for three years since his friend is gone save his life abroad. Her body, she keeps that for him, she waits. But it no longer has a lot of new, and sometimes, she receives VHS tapes where the other passes recorded messages at the top of pornographic films good markets that he does not even bother to erase… But this body was suffocating and sweating the need to be loved attracts all eyes and all desires, until they become a danger to itself.

Agatha owns a shop rental of video tapes, she is married, mother of a great daughter, a godly life, but she dies in his marriage. She no longer supports her husband. Or his clammy hands, or the pity dripping from his tenderness who oppresses a little more each day. It burns in secret for another man, it burns so strong that it would no longer be silent, but this union is impossible, so as to not implode, it relieves using her husband when he sleeps. She used his member to love another while knowing that this guilty pleasure was condemned to the gangrene of guilt.

Iza is the mistress of a married man for 6 years. To him, she has accepted everything with love, the underground, the solitude forced, the five-to-seven-too short, but today, he is beginning to tire of it. Jealousy, hatred, pain and anger seized her and overwhelm.

And then, Renata is an old woman, she knows that she has made her life and she ends up in the solitude and the anonymity of his small apartment modest. However, it fails to find the serenity, she is in love with his young neighbour, a sentiment that obsesses him to the point of doing the unthinkable…

UNITED STATES OF LOVE is a story tragically feminist. Not only does the complexity and empiricism of the nature of women, but he denounces at the same time the ignorance and frustration, by the Polish society. And by extension, any society, self-proclaimed moral rejecting the basic concepts and purely humanistic constitutional of feminism such as the right to dispose of his own body, and to aspire to something other than being a companion). Tomasz Wasilewski is a portrait of women that the desire to desire to consume, it kills small fire and die in a world governed by the invective that what they have already should be enough.

In addition to the fineness of the analysis of the director on the status of women, the film takes to the throat through a form that is highly narrative that transcends the about. The director is surrounded by the cinematographer Oleg Mutu (Palme d’or 2007, 4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days), and immerses his Poland and its fate in the coldness chilling and disembodied of a pitiful light reminiscent of blue. It burns inside, but outside, it’s death. The frames are perfectly thought out, empty, or décadrés or surcomposés and propel the film into the dimension of the most symbolic naturalism…. Some may criticize the film this fall into the abyss of gloom and despair : plans that are too long, the silence too heavy, frames too empty. But it is this aesthetics of death, which earned the film its significance. Each image emanates the paradox standing in the warm surrounded by the cold, the fire hits the ice, the desire that consumes the body and the world which makes violence, smothers him and turns it off – in any case the women, in the name of respect for the moral, always that of men. Moreover, Tomasz Wasilewski floats permanently between the lips of the women in the cigarette burns, and the smoke of which escapes through the nose, the mouth and invades the faces. The smoke that the desire to sweat and cigarette smoke, unceasingly, as the substitutes of the phallus of the beloved one, that you fantasy to have, but that nothing allows.

Tomasz Wasilewski is of the body the object of study central to his film. Here no question of the exalt, and (paradoxically) make an object desirable, on the contrary, it shows ugly (may be as he truly is) and at all ages. In the ugliness, there is shamelessness, the fragility, the vulnerability, and it is here, perhaps, access to a form of truth. The filmmaker reminds us that these bodies that tanguent are first before any of the bodies : muscles that extend and concentrate often in disgrace, fat, bones, and white skins, flanges, and invaded by the moles that age enlaidis. The sex acts, they are also demystified, unsightly, awkward and to the deformation of the body. The desire cannot, for the developer, only be a response to a stimuli outside (a vision of a beautiful woman, a handsome man who attiserait ) but beautiful and well a natural motion and constitutive of the human mechanism, a natural movement of life. I do not wish to, it is my body as the machinery of human desires; my body even ugly, same old, because my nature is to be desired for me to reproduce. The desire is a movement that is constitutive of the living. This is the nature of Man -philosophical, scientific and religious – that speaks UNITED STATES OF LOVE , and it is precisely because this nature is taken away from the woman (by the doctrines of men) in favour of validity only for the benefit of men, that the film is a feminist. UNITED STATES OF LOVE this is the story of the pure expression of Humanity of which one deprives the women.

Tomasz Wasilewski puts his stone on the Edifice of feminist thought. Through its staging, it points to the origin of the fundamental inequality, natural and absolute, of which women are victims in modern societies and antiquated. But beyond the message, Tomasz Wasilewski reminds us here with subtlety, and only to those who wish to hear it, that men are still far from having solved the mystery of women, and that this may be because they measure the greatness and the unfathomable freedom of the soul – like the divine body, which gives life – that they bâillonneront a long time in the hope to maintain control of a world that they want to their turn to snatch away the autocracy of the divine. A female politician said “feminism is a humanism“. Certainly.

Sarah Benzazon

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