United States of Love

Club Cert; Now showing, IFI

Poland 1990, the Eastern Bloc is changing radically and new things are on the horizon. Which is perhaps why the lack of change is so hard for the four women in this quartet of slightly overlapping stories which Tomasz Wasilewski writes and directs. So much of what he observes is accurate, eternal and uniquely female and on that level it works well. Overall it is beautiful, bleak but strays into being a bit boring.

All four women live in the same soulless Communist town. Agata (Julia Kijowska) is bored of her life and husband and has fallen for the local priest. Iza (Magdalena Cielecka) is the icily reserved school principal whose passionate affair with a married man is collapsing, Marzena (Marta Nieradkiewicz) is her former beauty queen sister who still has dreams and Renata (Dorota Kolak) is the older, lonely lady who sees a chance to participate instead of observe.

Their strangely pretty, grey, washed-out surroundings are punctuated by angry sex and potted plants. As a depiction of the occasionally deranged levels to which people are driven by lack of passion, this is rich, beautiful and well acted. Yet how it depicts that is uneven and too drawn out.

It’s beautifully shot by Oleg Mutu but a little too self-consciously directed on occasion with too many of the gorgeous, nearly still life shots and too many back of head shots but its aim is mostly true and the emotions linger.