Lech Majewski's films are governed by vision, not narrative. They belong to a realm of images, memorable and heavy with symbolism, unlike the classical structures with turning points and a punchline. Onirica is no exception—it is a film woven out of dream imagery, both visionary and personal. Alas, it is also filled with kitsch and pathos.
It revolves around a character called Adam (played by Michał Tatarek), a thirty-something-year-old, who survived a serious accident a few months earlier which killed two of those closest to him—his best friend and his beloved girlfriend. Adam quit his academic career and started working in a supermarket. Ever since the accident, he is constantly sleepy and uses every possible opportunity to take a nap, even if a brief one—even if it is in the shop's stockroom. Dreams are where he escapes to— medicine for his mind, damaged by the accident. They work better than religion or art. Dreams are the only way for Adam to meet his deceased loved ones—his father, girlfriend, and best friend.
The dream-like images are the best part of Majewski's film. They are haunting and aesthetically seductive. Majewski is fully dedicated to his own imagination, which he treats as the foundation of his film's tale. Even when its products are completely irrational, like the scene of ploughing the supermarket floor. In order to realize it, Majewski had to find oxen that were comfortable with a yoke.
We eventually managed to find them near Biskupin, where demonstrations of prehistoric farming are organized. These oxen couldn't be transported to anywhere else, so we had to built the entire studio around them. A scene that lasted twenty-something seconds took us a year and a half to prepare.
– the director said in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza.
These twenty seconds proved worthy of all that effort—Onirica's visual vibrancy is its strongest asset. It does, however, also prove to be its greatest weakness. The director who made Angelus fifteen years earlier builds this story out of images suffused with symbolic connotations. We will find in it a dove born out of a woman's womb and an ominous serpent tempting to commit evil, an angel with grey wings and a church altar flooded by a waterfall. Majewski doesn't even try to escape this air of kitsch—he consistently dares to forge images that are simply overflowing with meanings. As a result of this, Onirica winds up being an utterly manneristic and annoyingly blunt picture. The subtle narrative about mourning gets lost in the plethora of symbols and intertextual references.
I think of myself as a realist. In my opinion, the story of a man that I am telling in Onirica is more plausible than stories from soap operas or films with elaborate plots. The language of cinema is based on conventional imagery. Our minds conjure snapshots of our desires. One man pictures himself outside of a villa, with his wife, car, and two children, and works on making it come true, although reality doesn't seem to match it: the wife is not right, nor the car. When making a film like Onirica, I am liberated from the pressure of such snapshots.
– the director said in the same interview.
The surreal narrative created by Majewski takes the main protagonist through successive spheres of reality. He is led by Dante, whose Divine Comedy sounds from Adam's portable player. The audiobook helps him to cut off from the external world. The only living person he ever talks to is his aunt Xenia (Elżbieta Okupska), an intellectual and a translator of Persian.
The conversations Adam has with his aunt might be the weakest part of Majewski's film. When passing from the sphere of images to the sphere of words, the director pushes the boundaries of pretentiousness. His characters utter cliché phrases on the meaning of suffering, death, mourning, and about the historical philosophers. Xenia explains to Adam the Heideggerian theory of indestructibility of being, recalls old thinkers, talks about the absurdity of death and about the fact that “darkness is the cradle of light.”
In Onirica, Majewski takes his viewers on a journey across the world of culture. He scours it for hope, life pointers, and relief, but to no avail. Adam's personal mourning meets a national trauma. Adam's story is set against the Smoleńsk tragedy (in April 2010, a plane with ninety-six government officials, including the President of the Republic of Poland, crashed on its way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyń massacre). Massacre doesn't treat it as a theme, however, but as a prop, an element that completes a private tale. He doesn't delve into political disputes, but weaves Smoleńsk into his treatise on mourning. In Onirica, the Presidential crash is presented as one of the plagues infecting Poland—next to a flood and the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull.
Lech Majewski's film tells a story of human helplessness. It shows that any attempts of dealing with a trauma are doomed to fail—the protagonist's despair can't be fixed by either religion nor art. At the same time, Onirica is also a story about constant illusion, searching for hope in a world that is deprived of it. It is a story that is kitschy and painfully pretentious, but, nevertheless perversely interesting.
Bartosz Staszczyszyn, April 2015 r., transl. Ania Micińska, May 2015