Hey Elizabeth - your friends in Stitched-Up Heart weren't kidding! Man, was the wind ever blowing today. Gale Force all day long. Still going, too. It's horrible of course, and I am resigned to the probability that it's never gonna stop. It's been blowing since Christmas with only a few days respite in the four months since. When I was in my mid 20s, I deemed Northridge "The Real Windy City" and said that we should claim the title from Chicago. Then things calmed down for a while, excepting the annual Carlos Santana winds that strike us each Fall. But now we are back to re-claim our crown. Maybe if I wasn't such an outdoors person I wouldn't hate wind so much, but I am, and I do. And I think it is never gonna go away. (And Hey Elizabeth, is it true that Chicago is really the Windy City? Does the wind blow nonstop like it does here? Man, oh man...what in the world is going on? Is there anywhere where the wind doesn't blow? I think I may be losing my marbles once again).
That's my New One : Losing My Marbles. It is something to stay tuned for and it may be a Big Hit. I can add it to my arsenal, and now in addition to going on Tirades I can also Lose My Marbles from time to time. Here come the new fans in droves. :)
Tonight at CSUN we saw "The Maids Of Wilko" (1979) by Andrzej Wajda. We have seen during the course of this retrospective that Wajda was capable of working in a wide variety of styles, and with "Maids" he went back to the arty introspection of his earlier film "The Birch Wood", which I reviewed several weeks ago. His art house films are far removed from his complex and confrontational political films or his early War Trilogy movies which play like Hollywood thrillers. Art House was not his specialty, but when he made one, it stood out in his body of work.
We have seen two of these arty Wajda films now, "Birch Wood" and "Maids", and in both the setting is the countryside. In "Birch Wood" the central characters lived in a cabin, but in "Maids" they live in a fair sized manor, with a servant. In old Poland there must have been some money, and I guess this is what Wajda has referred to when he talked about the Nobility in the documentary footage that Professor Tim has shown. The Nobility was a class of people who owned land and had the title of Lord So-And So, and maybe lived in a country mansion, but in reality had little liquid wealth. Usually, according to Wajda, the Polish Nobility of the early 20th Century were people whose grandparents had been wealthy but who themselves were hanging on by a thread to the property and lifestyle.
The setting in "Maids" isn't this bleak, though. The ladies in question are five sisters who live in a large house on a spacious piece of land that includes a lake. They have horses, and they host parties. Their money is intact.
The story begins as a man (the tremendous Polish actor Daniel Olbrychski), now in his 30s, returns to the country town of Wilko to revisit his past. He is a veteran of WW1, the experience of which has scarred him deeply and has shut down his self-expression. His emotions are buried because of the horrors of the war, and he comes home to Wilko, fifteen years later, to visit his aunt and uncle, and more importantly to see once again the five sisters he knew as a teenager, when he was full of life.
The sisters have gone through their own life stories in the intervening years. Some are married, some are still single, but they all still live in the same house. The youngest sister falls in love with Daniel Olbrychski, and as she expresses her feelings, the other sisters confess individually that, when they were all younger, each one of them had feeling for him in her own way.
The sisters lived out in the country; he was the handsome boy who visited his aunt across the meadow; they were the only young people in that realm, one young man and five sisters. They were isolated in their world and he had a huge emotional effect on their lives.
Then he left to fight in the war, and they didn't see him again for fifteen years. But when he came back, he is changed. All the life has been depleted from him. The sisters too, have changed. Marriages, a divorce, a few children. The now grown youngest sister who has fallen in love with him.
He tries to express himself to each sister, and he recounts the memories of their younger years, and secretly shares his lifelong love for one sister above the rest.
"The Maids Of Wilko" is like a Bergman movie, a poetic and philosophical treatise on the way life experience weighs on people over time, and how it can affect relationships between people who have loved one another in the past. Of course, this is all very European, and must be seen through the eyes of a country who had to survive two World Wars. The main character, once a vibrant teen, is too scarred now to relate emotionally to the women he adored when they were all much younger.
But when he returns to the town of Wilko, the love slowly returns to the surface, beginning with the youngest sister who was just a child when Olbrychski left for the war.
Wajda shows that deeply held feelings are played close to the vest. People make life decisions that are not true to what they are really feeling, and that inner conflict is brought to the surface when the object of those feelings returns.
But in this case, he is too damaged by the war.
"The Maids Of Wilko" is a very soft film in which the characters express their feelings gently, with reserve. They want to connect, but they can't. In that respect, it is a sad tale. The sisters have each other, but Daniel Olbrychski has only himself.
It is gorgeously photographed, however, and some of the twilight scenes on the meadow, with the sun going down, look like paintings, or cinematic mirages.
I am loving these Wajda films, and I give "The Maids Of Wilko" Two Thumbs Up, although I wish the relationships had been explored a little more. It's hard to accept that nothing could come of all the feelings involved between the main characters.
Still a very good film. See it for sure, in your pursuit of world cinema.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):) see you in the morn.
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