NYFF. Four Nights with Anna.

"Grey and waterlogged, Jerzy Skolimowski's Four Nights with Anna is something like the Eastern European answer to Rear Window and Chungking Express, a deeply gothic, but no less romantic tale of voyeurism, breaking and entering, and secret love," writes Leo Goldsmith in Reverse Shot. "Instead of a wheelchair-bound James Stewart, we have Artur Steranko as emotionally crippled ex-con Leon Okrasa, who, like Faye Wong in Wong Kar-wai's film, opts to anonymously clean his beloved's lodgings rather than announce his love. But in Four Nights with Anna, as the title suggests, Leon does his housework (and a few other unsolicited things) nocturnally while Anna, the object of his distorted affection, lies drugged from the crushed sleeping pills Leon has slipped into her sugar."

Updated through 10/11.

"That Skolimowski never quite received the laurels awarded to the likes of Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda is something of an unpardonable oversight," argues Ed Champion. "For Skolimowski demonstrated with 1982's Moonlighting that he was an adept and muted iconoclast." As for Anna, though, it "doesn't quite live up to the complexities presented in Skolimowski's other films."

"In the 1970s, Skolimowski made Deep End, an impressively anguished portrayal of obsession," writes Akiva Gottlieb in Slant. "With its Cat Stevens soundtrack and sexually charged bathhouse setting, that film played like Harold and Maude with an extra hormonal kick. Four Nights with Anna, on the other hand, depicts a brutal and desperate yearning for connection, but asks only for audience pity. Without attempting even a superficial inquiry into the kinks of voyeurism, Skolimowski's return to the big screen is only interested in soiling its viewer with a cheap and gimmicky moral relativism."

"Skolimowski is a director who's able to render the bleak beautifully, with richness and complexity—while simultaneously preserving its essence," writes Aily Nash for Film Comment. "Emotionally, he manages to provide the viewer with the protagonist's deep sense of loneliness, achieved through the subtle characterization and stellar performance by Artur Steranko."

"Four Nights with Anna, in essence, tackles what I'll lazily dub the De Palma Principle (though 'The Blue Velvet Effect' would serve just as well)," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "In one corner, a man obsessed with a woman; at a distance, physically and emotionally, the woman. The challenge is how to film obsession in a way that's cinematic, mirrors the protagonist's own plight in a way that makes it as interesting to the audience to watch the watcher as it is for him to maintain an unwavering gaze, and dispenses with the psychological revelations that could be explicated in written form. As far as I'm concerned, Four Nights with Anna pretty much bombs on all counts."

Online listening tip. Ed Champion talks with Skolimowski.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Update, 10/10: "Recalling Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Love and Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire in its dark, brooding tale of voyeurism, unrequited obsession, and ache of desire, Jerzy Skolimowski's Four Nights with Anna may be seen as a modern day evolution of the cinema of moral concern, where the traumas (and transgressions) of history are intertwined within the moral fabric of contemporary life," writes Acquarello.

Updates, 10/11: "Both Deep End and the equally terrific Moonlighting (1982) are endlessly nuanced, constantly lobbing little hand grenades of unexpected but entirely credible human behavior," writes Mike D'Angelo at FilmCatcher. "But 17 years away from the camera seems to have badly rusted Skolimowski's hinges, comeback ballyhoo notwithstanding."

Online viewing tip. FilmCatcher interviews Skolimowski.

Posted by dwhudson at October 8, 2008 2:45 PM