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| Dido's Lament: Ewa Majcherczyk is accompanied by string quartet in this 17th-century masterpiece |
A new Polish film on Netflix directed by Jan Komasa, The Hater (Sala samobójców. Hejter), features classical music throughout. Selected pieces include "Ach bleibe dich, mein liebstes Leben" from Ascension Oratorio (Bach); "Ode to Joy" from Symphony #9 (Beethoven); "Les berceaux" Fauré; and "When I Am Laid in Earth" from Dido and Aeneas (Purcell). This last selection is performed by soprano Ewa Majcherczyk in a scene that intersperses shots of the
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| Family Affair: Szymon Komasa |
protagonist inside the theater against him working in the office. The significance of the music isn't lost on audiences as the characters in the opera mirror those in the movie with themes like betrayal, envy, jealousy, rejection, and abandonment. This is a sequel to Komasa's 2011 film Suicide Room (Sala samobójców) which also made use of classical music including works of Chopin, Gluck, Mozart, and Schubert. During the closing credits we also hear the director's brother, bass-baritone Szymon Komasa, singing "Lament Hansa" composed by Paweł Mykietyn. The track is featured on the singer's recording Polish Love Story. "An important movie, which exams Scio/Psychopathic behaviour in youth along with sides effects of social media presence in backdrops of political unrest in the world. This seems a lot to handle in one film, but Jan Komasa masterfully handled these subject matters. The film never felt overburden by the issues it tries to examine.
Starring: Maciej Musiałowski, Agata Kulesza, Danuta Stenka, Vanessa Aleksander, Maciej Stuhr, Jacek Koman, Adam Gradowski, Piotr Biedroń, Martynika Kosnica"
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| Silent Obsession: Tomasz (Musiałowski) tries to seduce Gabi (Aleksander) at the disco |
Read about the film, watch a video clip of Ewa Majcherczyk singing the Purcell piece, and view the trailer for The Hater after the jump.
"The last dozen or so months have turned into films touching on the society, in which the lower class with exceptional brutality puts the upper class on their shoulders in eternal opposition to it. What is significant is the fact that at least some of these productions, and certainly those reflected in the greatest media coverage, were covered with an attractive genre cinema. Americans regularly looking for inspiration in pop culture have released their comic book Joker onto the streets. In Korea, uncompromisingly preying on the capital of a wealthy family, the Parasite turned out to be an (un) ordinary family. In turn, here, under the guise of a masterfully made thriller, to which it would be worth adding the prefix cyber, Jan Komasa in a duet with Mateusz Pacewicz in Hejter propose a modern and white and red version of socially engaged cinema. The gentlemen do it so efficiently that the importance of the events does not seem to be tilted either side. In the new Suicide Room, both left and right are hit. At the center is Evil, which causes both sides to distance themselves even further. Tomek (Maciej Musiałowski) is a boy from the countryside. Apparently comes from a pathological family. Fate wanted him to meet the Krasucki family in
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| Fate: Ill-fated non-lovers |
his youth, representatives of the Warsaw elite coming to his side in the summer. When Tomek becomes an adult Tomasz (despite the fact that the Krasucki family constantly calls him 'Tomala'), he appears in the capital, and a family friend pays him for his law studies. However, the protagonist is expelled from the university due to plagiarism. Gabi (Vanessa Aleksander) tells about it in secret - the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. K., with whom he has a crazy crush. The girl reveals a secret to her parents, which turns them away from the boy. Using his cleverness and technical skills, Tom starts to keep an eye on the Krasucki family. It is possible for him to work in a PR agency managed by a ruthless businesswoman, known from the first part, Beata Santorska (Agata Kulesza). The corporeality of the company entails the gradual crossing of moral and ethical barriers. For Tom, who finds himself in this world like a fish in the water, the first task 'for yesterday' is to ruin the image of an online celebrity trainer. However, the larger guns are directed elsewhere. The target is aimed at the presidential campaign of the leftist candidate Rudnicki (Maciej Stuhr). Right-wing troll
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| Lost Boy: Duplicitous in a dark world |
accounts, fomenting hate speech, provocations and scandalous movements are in motion. Following the words of one of the characters, in places like this "you can do anything". Behind the angry sentence there is a somewhat caricatured and a bit exaggerated malevolence of the presentation of this specific criminal underworld, but this does not detract from the precision, and more importantly - the topicality of Pacewicz's text. The young screenwriter and the very talented director Komasa are slowly growing into the leaders of Polish social cinema, which is more and more appreciated in the world. The director, with a tendency to exaltation and visual excesses, seems to be in the best place in his career. In the "Suicide Room", the authors carefully fuse individual threads together so that the story turns into a piece that is both genreally solid and suitable for dialogue. This is what separates Hejter from such productions as Once Upon a Time in November or Bird Talk, in which the author's stubbornness and monothematicism stood in the way of being great works. In the Suicide Room, the authors carefully fuse individual threads together so that the story turns into a piece that is both generally solid and suitable for dialogue. This is what separates Hejter from such productions as
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Once Upon a Time in November or Bird Talk, in which the author's stubbornness and monothematicism stood in the way of being great works. In the Suicide Room, the authors carefully fuse individual threads together so that the story turns into a piece that is both genreally solid and suitable for dialogue. This is what separates Hejter from such productions as Once Upon a Time in November or Bird Talk, in which the author's stubbornness and
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monothematicism stood in the way of being great works. Komasa's film is not a great work, but it tries to imitate them very skillfully. Many elements in this multi-layered image seem to work perfectly fine. Aleksandra Gowin's flawless editing goes step by step with the elegant and responsive to potential narrative mishaps directed by the creator of Miasto 44. The capital Maciej Musiałowski, in an easy-to-overestimate role, proves that he has the right maturity and sensitivity to portray a person with such a complex psyche. The subject, although difficult and non-obvious, has been exploited as comprehensively, objectively and on many levels, and the cyber-thriller, which is still terra incognita for world cinema, has one of its best representatives. The bubble of the ideal, however, is broken by a certain conventionality that characterizes the presented world, which many may interpret as taking the easy way. It is up to you whether this Evil is credible, but one must admit that Hejter offers an extraordinary insight into socio-cultural mechanisms. Perhaps the movie will open some people's eyes."
[Source]
