Oh, dear. I had such high hopes for this one. I lived in Crakow for a year back in 2011, and fell in love with the Polish film industry. It seemed like every Pole I met was a cinephile, and the best of Polish film has such a huge mature talent for cinematography. Recenty In Darkness (W Ciemnosci), a story of Jews hiding under the streets and sewers of Lwow from the Nazis, and Ida, with its insanely beautify photography of a youg nun's process of taking vows, made some serious waves that reached even the shores of America. Krzysztof Zanussi has been making movies since 1969, so it's not like this is his first try. Maybe I just missed some basic aspect of the movie, more on that below.
Foreign Body opens in Italy. A Polish girl, Kasia, is saying goodbye to Angelo, an Italian boy, after what looks like a glorious summer love affair. She's going back to Poland to take her vows and go into a convent. He follows her to Poland and gets a job in a cutthroat white-collar firm that does "projects." In the firm, Kris Nilska (played by Agnieszka Grochowska, one of the most beautiful Polish actresses around), is trying to run the show as sadistically as she can while trying to get out from under the shadow of her dying stepmother, who was a sadistic prosecutor back in Communist times.
The firm here is a stereotype, the high-end equivalent to Roger Ebert's "Steam and Flame Factory" trope
where the combatants stalk each other on catwalks and from behind steel pillars, while the otherwise deserted factory supplies vast quantities of flame and steam.
In this case it's an office building, everybody wears suits and ties and has corner offices and revels in sadistic machinations over their subordinates, but nobody ever does any actual work. If I.T. was smart, they're probably not given logins to the corporate systems, because as far as ever getting anything done they would be utterly ineffectual. Maybe they could get around not having access to the computers by doing everything on paper, but there's not so much as a stapler in evidence in the building. Maybe I've been missing out, maybe my quarterly evaluations actually had a checkbox for "successfuly maneuvered a co-worker into being arrested in a Russian prison under false pretenses" that I didn't know about, who knows where my career would be today?
But hey, I'm a forgiving viewer. Every movie gets a free MacGuffin to move the plot along. If "The Office" is it for Foreign Body, that's fine with me. But...
First, I mentioned Ida already. Hmmm, same plot line around a young nun taking her vows, same hauntingly beatiful girl with a sincere love of the idea, of God. But same convent? Déjà vu? Sometimes it's an homage, sometime's it's a reference, an allusion, but is this actually a tie-in, a mockbuster? Was Zanussi just trying to cash in on Ida? I was worried, but then in the Q&A afterwards the directory specifically called it out both the nunnery and the "Kris Nilska" character as being references to the nunnery in Ida and the tortured ex-communist prosecutor in Ida, respectively. So I was worried, but now I'm confused. It sounds like he saw elements of Ida that he liked, and put them into his own movie. Is that bad? They're pretty big elements he borrowed. It feels derivative to me.
Second, unless you're playing a broad-comedy character named Dr. Evil, bad corporate actors don't twiddle their fingers laughing gleefully at their own machinations, sadisticly and explicitly rubbing their subordinates noses in the pile of how much they've just been duped. This was either a failure of the directory/screenwriter Zanussi or a failure of the actors. That's not how you play power. Compare for example the wayward son gone over to the corporate dark side in Manglehorn. We get to watch a brilliant scene of him on the phone (as his working class locksmith father watches), suck a feckless client into his (later to be revealed as dicey if not outrightly fraudulent) schemes. "Bob, you should be asking me to get into this deal. Look, I don't have a lot of time right now, so I'm going to hang up and count to ten and call back, and if the answer isn't 'yes' then I can't spend any more time with you" [hangs up, counts to ten] "Bob? Great! Bob, I'm really proud of you, you made the right decision. Look I gotta go..." Up to that point the son is running the scene, he owns the whole room, his father is slouched in the chair across the table from him, seemingly out of his depth. But then as the two talk and the old dynamic comes back into play, there's a magical interchange of body language as the son becomes more small and uncertain and father becomes the Father. That's how you act power and status.
An even better example came up the next day at the film festival (I'm flashing forward here). My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946), a cowboy movie. No, that's not right, it's a Cowboy Movie. It's an archetype of Cowboys, and Real Men, and how you play Confrontation. Henry Fonda walks up to the bar and stares down Victor Mature, full on, and nobody moves, nobody flinches, and it lasts for like ten seconds of screen time, or at least a lifetime. In cowboy movies you knew how to play authority.
Grochowska is beautiful. Maybe it's too much to ask for beauty and acting talent. Or maybe it was bad directing, or bad writing. But I found it really difficult to believe her as a sadistic corporate manager. Neither the character nor the portrayal was convincing. But Grochowska did ok when compared to her manager, her boss. Supposedly even more powerful and sadistic. Um, really, I think they teach basic body language stuff like that in acting class, don't they?
So I didn't find the evil corporation or the evil corporate people believable. However, one person at the Q&A afterwards actually called it out, exactly that, at what she like about the movie. How realistic it was because she actually worked for an evil corporation exactly like that. So what do I know? When I say "it's not like that" and she says "it's exactly like that", what exactly do we mean by "like that"? One person's broad caricature is another person's versimilitude. When I was in high school, my Latin teacher, Mr. Globocnik, told us how he spent time in German prison camps as a POW in Jugoslavia during the war. He told us the most realistic portrayal of that he'd ever seen was Hogan's Heroes, the TV comedy, because "it was exactly like that, you had to play games and find ways to use up the time".
Roger Ebert lists Network in his book of a hundred Great Movies. I haven't seen Network. From Ebert's description, it's apparently about the same kind of soulless amoral corporate machinations that Zanussi said he's speaking out about in this film. I wonder how the performances in that compare to Foreign Body. Ebert says it starts out as satire and farce. Maybe Foreign Body is supposed to be satire
the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
and I just didn't see the humor in it. If the whole thing was supposed to be farcical, then the elements lifted bodily from Ida would make sense, and be perfectly allowable. I'm not seeing it though. And I would find mocking Ida dangerously close to the boundaries of good taste.
But one last bullet I'm going to fire, to show that I'm Right and that other audience member was Wrong, is to talk about BSDM. Grochowska's sadistic character likes to wack people with riding crops (a Shades of Gray tie-in?) and laugh gleefully while doing it. At one point, at the end of a hard day, she's reduced to hiring a couple of gigolos who unhappily submit to her wacking.
Now, I don't know much about BSDM, but living in San Francisco I can't help reading a lot about it in the local weeklies, and the portrayal of some BDSM in The Valley Below (see yesterday) matches what I've read about it much more closely. It's always consensual, the BDSM people make a big point of that, and the whole point is that both parties find release in it. The (very light and tasteful) bondage scene in The Valley Below is staggeringly touching. And it is miles away from the detached riding crop wacking in Foreign Body.
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