Secret, presented in Berlin in 2012, introduced a different style. Wojcieszek stood halfway between experiment and socially committed cinema. He spoke about Polish blame toward the Jews, about the trauma of the Holocaust, and about memories as a material of which culture is made, at the same time escaping from journalism towards a style taken out of a music video, where message is born out of images and editing. The effect was a caricature – Secret was neither a serious statement about the relationship between Poles and Jews, nor a proper film essay.
In this context it is not surprising, that in How to Disappear Completely, Wojcieszek went all out. He resigned from the narrative whole and from creating complex portraits of the protagonists. The image is the main mean of expressing emotion. Deprived of a context, seducing only through form, atmosphere and rhythm.
I wanted trance. I hate political, social cinema. I am embarassed by such films. I reject them. Film is an art of trance, where the colours, the rhythms and the sounds form a hypnotic dream. I think we managed to do that.
– said Wojcieszek before the premiere.
And yet How to Disappear Completely is not a successful film. It’s a film of lost rhythm and broken promises. The first is made at the beginning – it’s the great first sequence in which two protagonists – one Polish and one German girl – play an unusual game. Dark-haired Gerda (Agnieszka Podsiadlik) follows the Little Bandit (Pheline Roggan). She goes on the tube with her, follows her step by step for a long time. Furtive glances are the beginning of a game of tormentor and victim, of the seducer and the seduced. There is something dangerous and alluring in it.
In Wojcieszek’s film this masquerade is the beginning of a journey through Berlin at night. The director follows the girls with his camera. A city odyssey starts, formed by visits in night clubs and little restaurants, bike rides, having sex with a man met by accident (Tomasz Tyndyk), pool swimming and pissing on the sidewalk.
Wojcieszek’s protagonists travel through Berlin barely speaking to each other. How to Disappear Completely has no similarity whatsoever to the romantic trilogy by Richard Linklater. It’s more of an attempt to connect Wong Kar Wai’s melancholy and the trance of Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void. An unsuccessful attempt. The image is not able to hold a two-hour long story. There is boredom instead of hypnotic rhythm and scenes with no meaning instead of mystery. And although Weronika Bilska’s dynamic cinematography is impressive, Julia Marcell’s music sounds great and Agnieszka Podsiadlik and Pheline Roggan do what they can, charm quickly escapes from Wojcieszek’s film and the rhythm of the trance becomes less and less cadent.
Author: Bartosz Staszczyszyn, April 2015, translated by N. Mętrak-Ruda, November 2015.