In transposing No Matter How Hard We Tried to the screen, Jarzyna combined theatrical and film editing and also makes use of animation. The changing colours of the lighting of the theatrical decorations determine the character of the film and thanks to video projections, the characters from various worlds meet in one place.
In the film version of No Matter How Hard We Tried, the space of the drama is created before our eyes. The Little Metal Girl draws the contours of walls, a door and a knob in a bright room. This isn’t just a director’s trick but a metaphorical device showing that the characters, their dramas and dialogues are only a convention and were designed in the image and likeness of us.
The keyword to understanding Jarzyna’s film is conventionality. The film space, the characters that personify Polish complexes and ambitions, and the language which the film characters use are conventional. Jarzyna (as Masłowska before him) shows the world as a set of empty forms that have no meaning. Real dialogue is substituted by overheard slogans, advertising Newspeak, and political gibberish. In No Matter How Hard We Tried, language doesn’t carry any meaning and determines only social, financial and cultural statuses. The characters’ words are clichés: the actor tells about his “spiritual search” in an interview, the director emphatically speaks about the excluded and gay people who are “well-kept and misunderstood”. The phrasemongering fest ends with a monologue delivered by a politician (a great display by Lech Łotocki), who gives a fiery speech on a TV screen about a golden era when the whole world was Polish.
When talking about the various ideas of Poland, Jarzyna makes fun of all of them. He laughs at those who listen to Chopin’s Prelude in E-minor and long for the idealized past, and at the left-wing discourse about the excluded and the owning class. He mocks the middle class for whom the Ikea catalogue is the Bible of everyday life. At the same time, he creates a horrific, humorous sketch about the contemporary precariat. No Matter How Hard We Tried is, after all, a grotesque tale about the disintegration of language and social and interpersonal structures.
Jarzyna has been experimenting with cinema for years. He doesn’t indulge in filmmaking but he makes use of film language, taking what he needs from it. On theatrical stages, he has put on “cinematic” plays by Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration / Uroczystość), Pier Paolo Passolini (T.E.O.R.E.M.A. / T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T.) and John Cassavetes (The Second Woman / Druga Kobieta). In collaboration with the National Audiovisual Institute, he filmed the play 2007: Macbeth, which was staged in the TR Warszawa theatre. Balancing on the line between the grammars of theatre and film, Jarzyna created It’s Good between Us, a bold and excellent film in which a sad story about 21st century Poland emerges from the stream of gags and linguistic jokes.
- No Matter How Hard We Tried / Między nami dobrze jest, Direction and screenplay: Grzegorz Jarzyna, after a play by Dorota Masłowska, cinematography: Radosław Ładczuk, editing: Rafał Listopad, scenography: Magdalena Maciejewska, cast: Adam Woronowicz, Danuta Szaflarska, Magdalena Kuta, Maria Maj, Rafał Maćkowiak, Roma Gąsiorowska, Aleksandra Popławska, Lech Łotocki, Rafał Maćkowiak, Agnieszka Podsiadlik, Katarzyna Warnke. Premiere: O3.10.2014. Distribution: the New Horizons Association.
Translated by: Marek Kępa