Agnieszka Holland is one of the most important directors of the impressive Polish film school, and the one who managed to build best an international career, of course, except for Roman Polanski. Most of her activity over the last two decades took place on the television studios where Agnieszka Holland has created fine original mini-series or directed episodes of successful series. Once a few years the director returns to her native Poland to make a feature film – always interesting, always approaching painfull themes from the present or the troubled history of Poland of the last century. ‘Spoor‘ (‘Potok’ in Polish) is a film solidly anchored in reality, the adaptation of a novel by the recent Nobel laureate for literature, Olga Tokarczuk, who co-authored the script along with the director. I haven’t read (yet) the book, but from what I read about the movie, it’s a faithful, maybe even too faithful adaptation. The film (maybe also the book) can be interpreted on several levels – political parable, eco-thriller, horror. Almost all fans of these genres will have their reasons for satisfaction as well as for objections.
The setting of the story is suited to a police mystery, maybe even a mini-series of the genre. We are in a mountainous area of Poland, with the symptoms and characters known to those who have lived in the last 30 years in the Eastern Europe that came out of communism: local mob, corrupt policemen, disoriented people trying to adapt to the changes. The main recreation of men is hunting. Most people seem to be in conflict with nature, the hunters decimate with cruelty and sometimes out of the law (regardless of hunting seasons) the animal world. Those who take an attitude in defending nature represent a marginalized minority. Strange things start happening, including violent deaths. Who is the murderer? Is it possible that the animal kingdom is trying to retaliate, maybe even to take revenge?
The theme is also addressed in other films, the first one that reminds me is the excellent French series ‘Les Revenants‘ (‘The Returned‘). Olga Tokarczuk and Agnieszka Holland, however, give to their story a political dimension. The mountain town and its surroundings are a micro-cosmos of a severely fractured society and of a political system that does not pay too much attention to the rights and opinions of minorities, and less they care about the environment. The majority of the inhabitants are non-educated, indifferent, sometimes violent and corrupt. The ones belonging to the opposing minority are alienated, intimidated, sometimes adept of esoteric hobbies and of New Agee philosophies. The main heroes of the film belong to the latter category, but of all, only Professor Duszejko is well-defined and excellently played by actress Agnieszka Mandat. The rest of the characters are more like sketches of portraits, without enough screen time to develop beyond stereotypes and to deepen the motivations of their actions and attitudes. This is my main cinematic objection. What is sufficient in a television series does not always satisfy in a feature film. ‘Spoor‘ has an interesting theme that urges reflection and debate, but the execution, this time, is below what I expected from a film by Agnieszka Holland. The ‘horror’ and eco-thriller threads are a little more convincing, and the expressive and depressing image helps, though the film director seems not to have wanted to push too far in this direction. The end clarifies much of what happened before, but opens up another dilemma, a moral one, that will accompany the movie’s viewers even after the screening ends.