Forgotten Love – Michał Gazda | #film

Forgotten Love – Michał Gazda

Michał Gazda’s stylish melodrama not only holds up against the classic film version of ‘Znachor’ but also shows that high-class entertainment cinema is possible in Poland. ‘Forgotten Love’ is one of the biggest cinematic surprises of the year.

When Michał Gazda began his directing studies at the University of Silesia a quarter of a century ago, Filip Bajon, who supervised the young filmmakers, asked them what film they would like to direct in the future. The budding artists quickly came up with the titles of films by Tarkovsky, Antonioni and Bergman. Michał Gazda then mentioned, among others, Pan Samochodzik (Mr. Toy Car) and Janosik (legendary Robin-Hood-type highwayman), tailored for mature audiences. And although his choice was the subject of malicious jokes in subsequent years, the director fortunately did not abandon his pop-culture ambitions. His Forgotten Love demonstrates Gazda’s ability to create entertaining cinema that willingly uses genre clichés, does not take offence at mass audiences and at the same time is produced to the highest standards of filmmaking craftsmanship.

By telling the story of Professor Wilczur, who loses his memory as a result of a beating and wanders around the villages of Mazovia as Antoni Kosiba, Gazda has created a fairy-tale melodrama about forbidden love and an escapist tale of a hero who brings people together and on screen evokes empathy from the viewer almost automatically.

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Znachor | Oficjalny zwiastun | Netflix

This is mainly thanks to Leszek Lichota, who fills the new Znachor with his acting truth. Lichota, who has been proving his artistic talents at least since Wataha (The Border, 2014), presents organic acting in this Netflix superproduction: he endows the film’s Wilczur/Kosiba with his own warmth, masculinity and hard-to-define nobility. He doesn’t go over the top, he doesn’t attack – he just is. That’s enough, especially if you have Lichota’s charisma, his awareness of his own body and his gaze, which can express radically different emotions in a split second.

Long before the premiere, many predicted that Forgotten Love would fail, assuming that it would be impossible to create characters comparable to those played by Jerzy Bińczycki, Anna Dymna and Tomasz Stockinger. And yet, the new adaptation of Dołęga-Mostowicz’s novel is alive mainly thanks to the excellent cast. Maria Kowalska, playing the main character’s daughter, seduces with her girlish charm, and her Marysia turns out to be a self-confident young woman who is able to fight for what’s hers. Ignacy Liss, who partners her, and Izabela Kuna, who plays Ignacy’s mother, are also good. The real acting discovery of Forgotten Love, however, is Anna Szymańczyk, playing the miller who extends a helping hand to Kosiba. This charismatic actress transforms a supporting role into an unforgettable creation of a strong and empathetic woman, feisty and unsure of her own emotions.

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Frame from ‘Znachor’, directed by Michał Gazda, 2023, Maria Kowalska depicted here, photo: Bartosz Mrozowski / Netflix

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Forgotten Love is also a display of high-class filmmaking craftsmanship. One of the authors of this success is Tomasz Augustynek, an excellent cinematographer who accompanied Gajda in his work on subsequent projects for years. His stylish cinematography combined with the director’s staging brings to mind associations with British costume cinema in the vein of Atonement. Although journalists have been looking for links between Forgotten Love and the classic adaptation by Jerzy Hoffman (Znachor [The Quack], 1982) with a persistence that is worthy of a more deserving cause, Netflix’s production offers a completely different aesthetic, and its sources of inspiration lie more in contemporary costume melodrama than in the classic film from forty years ago.

Gazda, whose credits include the TV series Belle Epoque, learned from his mistakes after working on that production, which was blatantly lacking in terms of set and costume realism: the dirty city was in fact a sterile, clean Kraków street, and the characters walked around in costumes taken straight from theatre dressing rooms. In Forgotten Love, the director offers a much more realistic texture. Yes, the film’s peasants still look too tidy, and some viewers are offended by the asphalt road connecting Warsaw and Radom, but in the end the screen manages to recreate a convincing image of the countryside in the 1920s and 1930s, a world you want to believe in – for example, when the camera leads us into the Museum of the Lublin Village, which the film’s production designer, Joanna Macha, had transformed into a vibrant film space, or when behind Professor Wilczur’s back we see the great bulk of Warsaw’s Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (demolished in the 1920s and here recreated by computer).

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Photo, movie set of ‘Znachor’, directed by Michał Gazda, 2023, Leszek Lichota & Magdalena Szwedkowicz depicted here, photo: Bartosz Mrozowski / Netflix

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Thanks to the Netflix film, Znachor by Dołęga-Mostowicz has become the first Polish novel to have three film adaptations – and one of the few that has always found great adaptors. After all, in 1937 the story of Antoni Kosiba was told by Michał Waszyński himself, the greatest talent of pre-war Polish cinema. Forty-five years later, the popular prose was tackled by Jerzy Hoffman, a filmmaker beloved by the Polish audience. Today this group is joined by Michał Gazda, a director who has spent years honing his craft on the sets of TV series and commercials and who in Forgotten Love proved that faith in the film genre and humility with regard to the craft are the key to mature, intelligent entertainment cinema. His impeccably tailored, heartening tale of love is one of this year’s biggest surprises in Polish cinema and a film that is destined for international success.

Forgotten Love. Polish title: Znachor. Directed by Michał Gazda. Screenplay: Marcin Baczyński, Mariusz Kuczewski. Cinematography: Tomasz Augustynek. Production design: Joanna Macha. Starring: Leszek Lichota, Maria Kowalska, Anna Szymańczyk, Ignacy Liss, Izabela Kuna, Mirosław Haniszewski. Premiere: 27 September 2023.

Updated 30 November 2023

Translated by Patryk Grabowski

'Znachor': When a Man Loses His Memory