Sieniawka
Marcin Malaszczak
2013 - 126 min - Vidéo HD - Couleur - Allemagne, Pologne

Where are we? This is hard to say. Characters are strolling about an unidentifiable patch of countryside. One of them is walking around wearing a crash helmet, he fights with an other weirdo, they make up and then they are attacked, etc. This first, impressively mastered film by young Polish filmmaker Marcin Malaszczak, starts as a puzzling fiction film. Then, after this prologue, we find ourselves behind the walls of a lunatic asylum. Although the setting is easier to figure out, inevitably, its inhabitants aren’t. Where are we? In some verist description? In the remarkable silence and cacophony of mental pain? In complete metaphor, about a country stuck on the narrow bench between the communist era and that of wild capitalism? None of these hypothesis gets corroborated for sure, yet a few clues, discretely but firmly scattered (like a beautiful episode in a devastated movie theatre) suggest that everything ought to be taken seriously, both the wandering and the description, both the mise en scène and its breakaways.
(Jean-Pierre Rehm, FID 2013)