Program note for Agnieszka Holland's A Woman Alone
Program note for Mezzanine, for July 10, 2024 screening of A Woman Alone. (I was pleased to program this screening for Micah Gottlieb’s excellent Los Angeles venue.)
A WOMAN ALONE
directed by Agnieszka Holland
1981, 92m, Poland, digital
An itinerant filmmaker who has worked throughout Europe and the United States–her best known films include Europa Europa (1990), The Secret Garden (1993), Mr. Jones (2019), and Spoor (2017)–the 75-year-old Polish director Agnieszka Holland has done her most trenchant and bracing work in her home country. While admired by the public there, her sharply critical films have made her a self-described “pebble in the shoe” to the country’s authority figures. Her latest, Green Border, an urgent dispatch dramatizing the ongoing crisis for Syrian refugees seeking asylum in Poland, is a box-office hit in Poland, where it has drawn vitriolic criticism from the government, who were chastened by the frank depiction of their brutal and callous treatment of the refugees.
The fearlessness of Green Border is a reminder of the uncompromising ferocity of her rarely-screened 1981 film A Woman Alone, an astonishingly dark portrait of a single mother, Irena, unforgettably portrayed by Maira Chwaligóg, who finds rejection, abuse, disdain, and worse, at every level of society. She is mistreated by the government, her co-workers, landlord, family members, ex-husband, and her romantic partner. A Woman Alone is the third and strongest in a trilogy of complex, powerful films that launched Holland’s directing career (after serving as screenwriter and assistant director for Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi), including Provincial Actors (1979), about the rivalries and dissent within a touring theater company, and Fever (1981), a period drama about the failure of Polish revolutionaries to counter the Russian army.
What is most astonishing about A Woman Alone is that it was made in the midst of a moment of optimism after the early success of the Polish Solidarity movement. Almost foreseeing the pall soon to be cast by the imposition of martial law, A Woman Alone is deeply pessimistic, reflecting the skepticism that Holland learned as the child of parents scarred by the horrors of World War II. Holland’s Jewish father, who lost both of his parents to Nazis, spent years hiding from his Jewish identity until he was arrested and most likely killed by Polish officials. Her mother was a Catholic journalist who joined the Warsaw underground during the War. Holland’s sober world view was also shaped by her years in Czechoslovakia, where she studied film during the Prague Spring, and saw the optimism of that revolution crushed by the Soviet crackdown in 1968.
Despite the supposed beneficence of the Communist party and the Solidarity union, there seems to be nowhere to turn for Irena, who can never find the assistance she needs. She seeks romantic solace with an equally desperate misfit, Jacek, who dreams of fleeing to the West. He asks “What is so special about Poland? There is nothing to be found here.” Assessing her own situation, Irena asks “Who am I,” quickly providing the answer “Nobody.” The two then embark on what may be the grimmest sex scene ever committed to film.
As claustrophobic and bleak A Woman Alone is, the film is also exhilarating, for its razor-sharp social critique, its intense psychological insight laced with honest and black humor, and its sheer narrative power, as it spirals through a series of chilling twists. It is a film that rejects the comfort of cliches, from patriotic idealism to romantic melodrama. Yet it creates intense sympathy for its heroine, for the palpable force of her thwarted desires–sexual, emotional, and financial. Not surprisingly, the film was censored by the government for its harsh social critique. Made in 1981, intended as a television movie, it was not released until 1987, years after Holland had gone into exile. It holds today as one of her greatest works, even as it offers no easy pleasures.