The life stories in ‘United States of Love‘ (the original title is ‘Zjednoczone stany milosci‘), the 2016 film by Polish director and screenwriter Tomasz Wasilewski take place in 1990. That was the first year of freedom in Eastern Europe after 50 of years of wars and totalitarian communist dictatorships, and the four not so young women who are the heroines of the film enjoy for the first time a personal freedom with which they do not exactly know what to do with. Each of them lives an impossible love story, and none of them manages to find solutions to turn their dreams and desires into reality. Are these individual stalemates or the crisis of a generation that has led to change but no longer has the power or skills to use this change in their own private lives? Tomasz Wasilewski‘s film addresses a recurring theme in Eastern European cinema after 1989, the original flavor of his script (awarded a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival) being the fact that his heroines are all women. The film has an explicitly feminist perspective, although it is written and directed by a man. Hence some of the qualities of the film but also some of its problems.
What I liked. The cinematography of Oleg Mutu, creator of the visual style of the films of directors such as Cristian Mungiu, envelops the whole film in an atmosphere of standardized geometric gray, in which the colors and feelings of the characters struggle to be perceived. The structure of the film is symmetrical, four life stories of four women, with an exceptional scene in the middle of the film, which those who will see it will not forget for a long time, neither aesthetically nor emotionally. The changes that take place around are hinted at by fragments of news from that fractal year in the history of Poland and Eastern Europe which was 1990. The narrative structure is non-linear, consisting of several time loops that together compose the film’s message. The acting interpretations, especially of the four main characters are very good, within the limits of the conception and the directorial indications.
What I liked less. The directorial approach is cold and the four stories are repeated in similar terms and attitudes. The result is more routine than emotional amplification. We can understand the lack of communication and emotional paralysis of one or the other of the heroines, but all four act similarly and assume in an illogical way the wrong decisions, sometimes with tragic consequences. I’m far from an opponent of nudity on screen, but in this case the use of nudity seemed excessive to me. Each of the four heroines is exposed nude several times, and perhaps just in a third of them nudity would be justified. I assume that the director wanted to express in this way the feelings of liberation experienced by the heroines, as well as their internal tensions and vulnerabilities in the unhappy relationships they live. But I doubt the film would have looked the same if it had been directed by a woman. The heroines of ‘United States of Love‘ enjoy very little love if at all. Freedom does not bring them happiness. The first thing to learn or re-learn after liberation is to live and decide what to do with your own life.