SYNOPSICS
Zjednoczone stany milosci (2016) is a Polish movie. Tomasz Wasilewski has directed this movie. Julia Kijowska,Magdalena Cielecka,Dorota Kolak,Marta Nieradkiewicz are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2016. Zjednoczone stany milosci (2016) is considered one of the best Drama movie in India and around the world.
In euphoric early 1990s post-Communist Poland, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, four women experience an utterly different reality, sinking deeper and deeper into despair. Agata, a young married mother, finds herself consumed by an unhappy marriage and an almost obsessive infatuation for an unreachable man, as the frigid school principal, Iza, battles with rejection. Meanwhile, Iza's sister, Marzena, a 1986 beauty pageant winner and, nowadays, an aerobic instructor, suffers from her husband's long absence. Likewise, Renata, a reclusive middle-aged language teacher, finds solace in her singing birds and a silent longing for the unattainable object of her desire: her next-door neighbour. Sadly, as the quartet chases a pure and intense passion in all the wrong places, the piercing sadness of unrequited loves and the unceasing anguish of bitter obsessions linearly connect them. Does pain exist in the United States of Love?
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Zjednoczone stany milosci (2016) Reviews
Astonishing
Astonishingly mature work written and directed by the young Polish director Tomasz Wasilewski. It's stuffed full of amazing images and superb performances. The individual, overlapping stories of four women in a quiet town are presented in compelling scenes in which it's impossible to anticipate what will happen next. Meanwhile, in the wider world, discussions are taking place about the unification of Germany, the nail in the coffin of Eastern European Communism, which had effectively collapsed the year before, liberating Poland from what had been the Soviet Union. The counterpointing of these private and public themes is brilliantly accomplished by Wasilewski, who has blossomed as an artist with this film. The quartet of actresses are Julia Kijowska,Magdalena Cielecka, Dorota Kolak and Marta Nieradkiewicz, with Ms Kolak particularly moving as a bewildered teacher thrown on the scrapheap. There is strong support by an equally accomplished quartet of men: Tomasz Tyndyk, Andrzej Chyra, Marcin Czarnik and Lukasz Simlat.
Total waste of time
Never in my life has any film made me regret buying the ticket. Wasilewski's movie is so badly executed the visit in the cinema is an excruciating experience. There is no script (how come did it get an award in Berlin? it doesn't make any sense), the cinematography sucks (what happened to the colors?), the direction is terrible (Wasilewski can't make use of terrific cast - they all seem lost in this story) and the score is non-existent. I will not mention intentional and over the top nudity (I don't mind nudity, but the number of penis and vagina shots is inexplicable taking into consideration movie's theme) and a final scene, which sums up my experience in the cinema. That puking woman (that's not really a spoiler - the scene doesn't fit the movie whatsoever) is like the director puking on the audience. Definitely not recommended.
Excellent and really outstanding!
I am sure this is not the easiest movie for many,but I find it brutally expressive, overwhelming and especially original. I don't know the fancy words for a review but I can tell you, most of the movie I will probably remember for a very, very long time. I love the very Eastern European picture and most of the characters - the play of the school director is so powerful that she is almost iconic. This is pure realistic art against the grain, shallow and mediocre entertainment going on in cinemas.
I just wish they'd kept their clothes on...
It is the early 1990s and Poland is newly democratic. But the day-to-day concerns of its citizens are the same as they ever were, and this film follows four women: Catholic Agata (Julia Kijowska), fascinated by the local priest but trapped in a marriage to a man who disgusts her; headmistress Iza (Magdalena Cielecka), having an obsessive, long-term affair with a pupil's father; middle-aged teacher Renata (Dorota Kolak), forced to retire and sexually attracted to Marzina (Marta Nieradkiewicz), a one-time beauty queen who now makes a living teaching aerobics. As with young director Tomasz Wasilewski's previous film, 'Floating Skycrapers', 'United States of Love' is chock-full of nudity. Unlike 'Floating Skyscrapers', however, a lot of it is nudity you do not really want to see: wrinkles and flab abound! Some of it is also in questionable taste: the viewer may wonder, for example, whether the camera has to linger for quite so many minutes on the nude form of a young woman immediately after she has been sexually assaulted. What I take to be the filtering out of colours certainly sets the bleak and glum tone, but perhaps was too easy a way of doing so? Whatever, I enjoyed following the women's stories, predictable as they sometimes are (when Iza picks up a young man at a bus station you just know he will turn out to be one of her pupils, and the woman-falls-for-priest plot line is probably as old as religion itself). The lead actresses all give good performances - particularly Kolak as the lonely lesbian. One final point - even you do not smoke, you may find yourself developing smoker's cough after seeing this. In some scenes so many people are smoking you can barely see the action...
Not really a woman's film about women
This film played one night during the Making Waves 2016 film series at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville NY. It is the story of four women's relationship with the men in their lives after the fall of communism in 1990. The film is beautifully written and the production is excellent. Once you look beyond an individual female character's immediate actions, you are confused as to what really motivates them. Yes, it makes sense that you mope because the handsome man does not respond. But why would you be attracted to this particular man in the first place etc. I was at a Q&A with the actress who played Agata. A woman in the audience asked what motivated her character and Ms Kijowska answered that she struggled with it. Then she fell back on the easy excuse that the lack of freedom to make bad choices in communism created this tension and frustration. I think it is because the writer and director is a man and it is a kind of male fantasy of power and control. For me one of the most powerful portraits of male cruelty reminiscent of the black and white continental films of the 20's and 30's occurred in a scene in Iza's apartment involving an open window. I may never forget it. Of course the consequences were devastating and Iza will pay. All of the women pay.