![There was a Nobel Prize, will there be an Oscar? “Chłopi” is beautiful and honest cinema [RECENZJA]](https://ocdn.eu/pulscms-transforms/1/A-lk9kpTURBXy8xNTQwOWM3MDAyYTA2MjNkOTcxMWFmOTMyNThhZGZhMy5qcGeTlQMAA80He80ENZMJpmNjYWUxYwaTBc0EsM0Cdt4AAaEwAQ/kamila-urzedowska-i-miroslaw-baka-w-filmie-chlopi.jpg)
DK Welchman (aka Dorota Kobiela) has come a long way to be able to tell stories boldly and expressively in cinema at the intersection of acting and drawing. After his Oscar-nominated film “Loving Vincent” with Hugh Welshman, he moved on to the novel “The Peasants.” Although she is not a mother, she portrays Jagna with maternal tenderness. He predicts her fate differently from Raymond. If Jagna were alive today, she would join the women’s strike. And in the village of Lipsi she had no chance. She paid a heavy price for her independence.
Raymond had an ear for dialogue and a passion for breaking patterns. The novel “Chłopi” was the culmination of his writing career. One hundred years after the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the view about the universality of the work seems to be correct. Few books accurately reflect the language and sentiments of rural Poland. The author wrote the text several decades after the abolition of slavery, yet a picture emerges from the work’s four volumes of a group that could only live on crude and sovereign principles. Many still stick with them to this day, and it was this parallel that encouraged the duo DK and Hugh Welshman to take up the classic work.
Kamila Orzodowska and Cezary Lukaszevic in the movie “Chłopi”
The girls were “sold” to elderly widows for millions of dollars
Let’s provide some context, starting with the author. The son of an organist and an educated noblewoman. In his adult life, he played roles in a theater group, worked as a lineman and even as a mediator. However, it was writing that guaranteed him success and livelihood. We were wondering about Władziu before he was elevated to the literary altar. Spiritualism was in his blood, whether he wanted it or not, and so was Catholicism. He was at the Pauline novitiate, right under the nose of the Black Virgin. No coordination or exaggeration. He returned to Jasna as a correspondent. He walked among the crowd of thousands of pilgrims and took careful notes. “Pilgrimage to Jasna Gora” was the first Polish and immediately participatory report. The future Nobel Prize winner was 27 years old and showed great potential.
This famous report is worth knowing as context for what appears on screen in the Welshman family’s film The Peasants. Marian worship also dominates their adaptation. Women from the village of Lipsi took refuge in him, even though it was mentally impossible for them to leave the room. I know from the director that after its world premiere, the film was met with misunderstanding on this issue in one of the reviews.
In fact, it is hard to believe that beautiful girls were “sold” to old widows for millions of dollars. The girl had nothing to say. The farmer came to ask for his hand in marriage, but he spoke to his mother. nightmare. The reviewer wondered why she was with Purina. If the critic in question had had a great-grandmother from Poland, he would have known that achieving subjectivity was difficult at that time.
Kamila Ordowska in the movie “Chłopi”
She dreamed of leaving the nest, but she did not have enough courage to do so
We are talking about Jagna, who had a talent for artistic work, and wanted a different life. She dreamed of getting out of the nest, but she did not have enough courage, or perhaps the awareness that it could be done simply, without anyone or anything noticing.
Jagna’s need for independence goes far beyond the 19th-century rules prevailing in the village of Lipce. The rest of the characters can be successfully integrated into the group, the collective hero who says and does what he is told.
The most attractive thing, to this day, in Raymond’s novel is the language. An airy colloquial phrase, on the border between reality and dream, fairy tale and naturalism. It flows unsettlingly like Ravel’s “Le Gibet,” the second part of “Gaspard de la nuit” from 1908, in which the hero awaits the arrival of the devil. His temperament is similar to Jagna. The premiere of the work coincided with the publication of the last volume of “The Peasants”. There are no coincidences.
Kamila Ordowska and Robert Golaczyk in the movie “Chłopi”
Is slavery still in our blood?
I also mention France because it is the place where Raymond wrote the novel. Far from his homeland, he faced the past in which his parents encouraged him to live in his father’s country. The writer rejected this possibility, but in “Chłopy” he seems to wonder, partly in the character of Antik, partly in the character of Jagna. What if he became the organist in the local parish.
The Welshman family film shows the double thinking of people who lived on the border of the 19th and 20th centuries. They are supposed to be free, but they are too weak to decide for themselves.
The film’s painting work took five years. More than a hundred painters in Poland, Ukraine, Serbia and Lithuania created oil paintings on canvas, which became the main frames in the film. A total of 80,000 of them were created. Radek Ładczuk and Szymon Kuriata are responsible for the images. Costumes were designed by Katarzyna Lewińska. Appearing in front of the camera are, among others: Mirosław Baka as Maciej Boryna, Kamila Urzędowska as Jagna, and Ewa Kasprzyk as the mother. In the scenes we see inspiration from the paintings of Young Poland: Józef Celmonski, Ferdinand Ruszczyk and Leon Wieczkowski.
This film inspires us to come to terms with our peasant origins. It begs the question whether serfdom is still in our blood.
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