Stasik carefully listen to each of them and fishes out the most moving sentences. ‘I deleted his number from my phone. He is married. It’s been so many years and I still can’t stop thinking about him. This is love’, confesses one of the characters. But we won’t find any talking heads in 21 x New York. We hear the stories about the characters’ lives off camera – they are meant to complement the impressional images the director peeks at.
Stasik filtered New York everyday life (it would be more precise to say ‘everynight life’, though, as most of the scenes take place after sunset) through his sensitivity. In the fast-moving city pulsing with diversity, the director focused on those who are lost. From the buzz of the big city he brings out stories full of longing: about better life, new relationships, the need for being close with other people. Together they constitute a terribly sad yet beautiful film postcard.
In an interview for Culture.pl the director admitted that the form of his movies is very often inspired by music, which sets the rhythm of the stories and defines their emotional temperature and character. In 21 x New York it is even more important than in the previous films. The trance-like, wavering film by Stasik has the structure of a whirl. It draws the viewer in with a kaleidoscope of attractive images. The dynamic montage lightens the document – it makes the stories about loneliness lose their depressive dimension. 21 x New York is primarily a story about constant searching and fervent encounters with the outside world.
Stasik’s documentary film resembles the poetical films of Jarmusch on the one hand, and on the other, the trance-like stories of Gaspar Noé. Both melancholia and a trance-like rhythm are present – so are a few stories and several characters that will be engraved on memory for long. For instance, a sensitive small boy and his father, a psychotherapist, who could easily be one of the characters in Todd Solondz’s films.
21 x New York proves Stasik is one of the most fascinating Polish documentarians. He doesn’t sign up for any documentary schools or currents, he creates his own, perhaps assuming the position of an outsider. He tells his stories in his own unique way, looking for a form that would express what is deeply hidden and inaccessible to the camera. The director’s sensitivity and artistic courage allows 21 x New York to break through the shell of superficiality and touch the painful truth about modern life and the people living it – lost in an aimless chase.
- 21 x New York, screenplay, directing, cinematography: Piotr Stasik, montage: Dorota Wardęszkiewicz, Tomasz Wolski, Piotr Stasik, music: Michał Fojcik
Written by Bartosz Staszczyszyn, translated by NS, June 2016.