Docile & Conservative: Sex in Polish Cinema

Kadr z filmu "Sztuka kochania. Historia Michaliny Wisłockiej" w reżyserii Marii Sadowskiej, 2016. Na zdjęciu: Piotr Adamczyk i Magdalena Boczarska i Justyna Wasilewska, fot. © Jarosław Sosiński / Watchout Productions, full-width, Scene from ‘The Art of Loving: The Story of Michalina Wisłocka’, 2016. Pictured: Piotr Adamczyk, Magdalena Boczarska, Justyna Wasilewska; photo: © Jar, Docile & Conservative: Sex in Polish Cinema

#film

Modern Polish cinema hardly lacks portrayals of romantic overtures. Women directors, in particular, are trying to have more honest conversations about sex in film – but a fear of sensuality remains.

Embarrassing desires

Walerian Borowczyk believed that sex interested everyone. His erotic visions in the 1970s shocked and seduced viewers in turn. In Beast, a film exploring male desire, a young American woman becomes the object of desire for a lust-fuelled beast. Lisbeth Hummel, who played the lead, dismissed the project in Kuba Mikurda’s documentary Love Express: The Strange Case of Walerian Borowczyk: ‘It’s a naïve, anachronistic male fantasy’.

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Scene from ‘The Story of Sin’, directed by Walerian Borowczyk, 1975, photo: Perspektywa Film Studio / Polish National Film Archive / www.fototeka.fn.org.pl

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During a screening of the film ‘No End’ in a Warsaw theatre, there was quite an incident: at the end of a scene in which the female lead gives herself to a foreigner, a young man turned to his friend with a proposition not to be turned down: ‘Let’s go, Kaziu, they’re not going to f… anymore.’

Author

Trans. AZ

This is an excerpt from the article Sex Po Polsku (Sex in Poland) from the magazine Kino (Film), published in 1986. The film in question, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s No End, demanded a great deal of the mutual leads, Grażyna Szapołowska and Daniel Webb. The actors rose to the occasion, even though the restrictions for including an erotic scene in a film under the communist regime were rather modest and strict.

After 1989, however, little changed in the relationship between Polish directors and their approach to intimate encounters. It’s shocking that in the 21st century, the sphere of eroticism on screen still causes such embarrassment.

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Scene from ‘No End’, directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski; 1984. Pictured: Grażyna Szapołowska; photo: Tor Film Studio / Polish National Film Archive / www.fototeka.fn.org.pl

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If, for its poster, Kieślowski’s No End had used a photo of its leads in the nude, it would have certainly suffered the same fate that many foreign pictures suffer in Poland. The Nowe Horizonty (New Horizons) Group was recently banned from promoting Adina Pintilie’s Romanian film Touch Me Not. Earlier, the group ran into the same problem with the German-Brazilian documentary The Cleaners. In both cases, the internet reacted conservatively to the characters’ naked bodies.

You would think that after the films of Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses), Buñuel (Belle de Jour), Haneke (The Piano Teacher) and Winterbottom (9 Songs), sexuality in cinema would no longer be taboo. And yet, in the land of the Wisła, it still is.

Difficult conversations

Anja Rubik, the Polish ex-supermodel, began her campaign #sexedpl by reminding people of Robin Campillo’s film 120 Beats Per Minute, which she had watched that year in Cannes. The silence surrounding the AIDS crisis in the 1990s can be compared to the silence around the topic of sex – which, according to Octavio Paz, cinema could help by showcasing these difficult conversations.

A breakthrough of this ceiling of silence was supposed to be The Art of Loving: The Story of Michalina Wisłocka. Maria Sadowska, the director, wanted to remind people of the popular sex-education author and her bold (for the time period) personal life. It’s difficult to say the 16, realistically styled erotic scenes in the film were very successful. The supposedly provocative nature of the film turned out to be as shallow in its attempts as Małgorzata Szumowska’s Elles: the only piquant parts of the film were the curse words.

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Scene from ‘Elles’, directed by Małgorzata Szumowska, pictured: Anaïs Demoustier, photo: Kino Świat

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Filmmakers have been playing with colorful language since the year 2000, with Boys Don’t Cry. Kuba Czekaj is one such filmmaker unafraid of salty language. In Baby Bump, the main character, Mickey House, sells his urine and uses the money for plastic surgery on his ears. The teenager can’t handle his pubescent acne, strange body and overgrown genitals. His mother’s sexual life fills him with greater lust than vaginal cream.

Meanwhile, in Jakub Piątka’s short film Users, where an internet algorithm links men and women, the program’s clients perform a striptease in low lighting, ashamed of each other’s nakedness. It’s hard not to think it might in fact be the director’s shame coming through in this scene instead. On the other hand, Konrad Aksinowicz’s Into the Spiral features a climactic sex scene meant to signify the end of the characters’ marriage problems. But the wild copulation feels premeditated and fake.

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Scene from ‘Into the Spiral’, directed by Konrad Aksinowicz; photo: promotional materials

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Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure (originally: Córki Dancingu) treats sex as the last marker of adulthood. Two mermaids go through their first great love and first sexual embarrassment. In the director’s sophomore release Fugue, she tries harder to get at forbidden sexuality. She manages to a degree, although only two scenes go beyond traditional fare – oral sex in a car and masturbating in a bathroom.

Smoczyńska chooses physiological eroticisation rid of elegance, like that seen in the films of Carlos Reygadas, Phillippe Grandriux and Bruno Dumont. Fugue, much like Anna Jadowska’s Wild Roses, questions the status quo, but doesn’t have the necessary ease to play with the possibilities.

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Scene from ‘The Lure’, directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska; photo: Kino Świat

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Sex & ‘Wild Roses’

For bumblebees, sex is an acrobatic dance between flowers. Ewa, the main character of Jadowska’s Wild Roses, gathers rose petals into baskets with her friends. Overwhelmed by the burning heat, she lies down in the rosebushes. Soon, she will meet with Marcel, her 14-year-old neighbor, who is infatuated with her.

Jadowska builds a traditional analogy between sex and nature, not bothering to cross any lines. She stops at kissing and touching. For the exterior scenes, she draws inspiration from Andrew Wyeth, whose works convey human loneliness in large expanses of nature. Here, it also refers to their oppressiveness; the thorny roses, overgrown bushes and constant buzzing of insects.

Wild Roses tries to tell the story of women’s desire for emancipation. The tired Ewa, no longer attractive to her husband, is as archetypical as her never-finished home. In the end, she finally expresses her frustrations, but even this doesn’t lead to change.

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Scene from ‘Wild Roses’, directed by Anna Jadowska; 2017. Pictured: Marta Nieradkiewicz; photo: Alter EgoPictures

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Kadr z filmu "Dzikie róże" w reżyserii Anny Jadowskiej , 2017. Na zdjęciu: Marta Nieradkiewicz, fot. Alter Ego Pictures

In Now Me, Anna Jadowska presents sex as sin. The hitchhiker Hanka lets loose with the men she meets on the road, but the encounters only leave her with a sense of shame. On the other hand, in With Love, Ewelina, disconnected from her emotions while filming amateur porn with her husband, pretends to have an orgasm.

Trailer for ‘Now Me’, directed by Anna Jadowska

A hunger for closeness

Olga Chajdas’ well-composed and visually thoughtful Nina is a different story. Nina is not on the lookout for the right owner of a pair of boxers to have mechanical sex with. She wants to escape beyond societal norms, and so begins a relationship with Magda, a lesbian. The new girl is not meant to be a candidate for her love, but Nina is surprised by the intensity of her feelings for her. These feelings eventually lead to consummation, filmed sensually and with emotional sensitivity.

Trailer for ‘Nina’, directed by Olga Chajdas

Chajdas received a Golden Claw at the Gdynia Film Festival in the Visions Apart contest, for her ‘unique style of storytelling and exploration of topics rarely scene in Polish cinema’. It was also nominated for the 2018 Polityka Passport Award. Nina is an answer to the lack of films capable of discussing corporeal love in a bold language and with a freedom of narration.

Sexual euphemisms

Sperm and periods don’t exist in Polish cinema. The current culture also has created a taboo around showing genitalia or breasts. To go beyond these restrictions, as Olga Chajdas did, is seen as lowbrow pandering. Relationships between men and women are strictly the purview of romantic comedies, where these relationships are the butt of jokes, with sex taking place under a duvet. The problem is that the audience’s interest in the under-the-sheets action plummets quicker than mercury in a thermometer.

Polish directors create love stories that are either too clumsy to be believable or as plain as milk. It’s almost as if such classic stories as Elfriede Jelinek’s Lust, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Erika Jong’s Fear of Flying never existed. Sex scenes involving plastic elements or masturbation with a piece of liver from the meat shop don’t have to be pornographic. They can be a better glimpse into the inner life of a character.

It feels logical that women directors are the ones slowly pushing against the puritanical border forbidding real portrayals of intimacy. Through their films, they are slowly expanding a deeper level of communication in regards to physical affection and a more precise description of sexual relationships. Their emancipatory gaze is a chance at freedom for the whole of Polish cinema.

Originally written in Polish, translated by AZ, Sep 2019

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