In Woman on the Roof, Jadowska once again speaks up for invisible women. In Wild Roses, she told the story of a young mother whose husband went abroad for work and who became embroiled in an affair with a teenage neighbour. This time, she invites us into the story of one of the millions of mother-followers who lost themselves in the service of their loved ones. We know them well – they are our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sometimes neighbours. We pass them on the street or in the local shop. Yet the cinema has been consistently silent about them. Even when these women appeared on screen, they were usually victims of spectacular violence, pathology or major life dramas. As if they themselves did not deserve their own story.
But Jadowska tells the story in a completely different way, she speaks in a half-whisper – a bit like her heroine. She doesn’t summon any grand phrases, she doesn’t seek showy scenes. She knows that Mira’s truth lies elsewhere – in the small gestures, the fearful glances, the seemingly invisible transformation that the sixty-year-old experiences. Dorota Pomykała, playing her character, performs a true acting concerto here. It has been years since Polish cinema has seen such a wonderful female creation, created with sensitivity, sparingly and painfully true.
Nor have we had many films in domestic cinema that are as precise in their description of depression, a destructive force that renders one completely powerless and slowly drags one into darkness.
In drawing a portrait of the cinematic Mira, Jadowska skilfully captures the moments of her inner decay. She forces the protagonist to confront her own problems in order to show how powerless she is. Woman on the Roof is a call for sensitivity – towards another human being, those closest to us, those ‘untouchably dear’ as Barańczak said, who stand beside us and whose dramas we often fail to notice. Jadowska makes us co-participants in the journey to the bottom of depression, but in a beautiful scene of a therapeutic ritual she shows that there is also light at the end of the tunnel. Because her film – although heartbreakingly sad – offers hope, saying that we can always try to fight for ourselves, break through paralysing fear and open up to the world.
