Spotkanie na Atlantyku (1980) User Reviews

Peculiar ocean liner in the past-present haze

[figueroafernando · 7/10 · 25 December 2022]

In the middle of the ocean liner, Kawalerowicz painted this fresco of the human being, less incisive, it is true, than other of his works but finished off with his customary skill. With the advantage of pure realism, the plot takes advantage of the journey to offer a collection of passengers that allow us to understand George Bataille's position when he referred to the "labyrinth of beings" in L'Expérience intérieure. Let's see the case of the Nowaks, they are even presented like this by the captain to others, without them being except lovers and by the way, in the most insipid of their stages as a result, possibly of the near heart attack of the eminent professor and the care that as a vote his wife-assistant swore to him. Bataille says "the sufficiency of each being is relentlessly refuted by its fellow beings", and is it not so? One by one Magda's affections and attentions and offers (go swimming, go to the captain's ball) are replicated with indisposition by her eminent companion. But Bataille continues, right there in Antecedents of the torture, third part, he says "Genius lowers more than he raises...", and don't we see him with the young gigolo and fortuitous companion of the singer Irena? He detests guys like them, he tells the doctor Piotr Walter, and speaking of Walter who was mistaken for Nowak, Bataille acknowledges "even a look, which expresses admiration, clings to me like a doubt." Walter ends up showing suspicion of Nowak, shown when the captain and assistants brought him the birthday cake, but later also perhaps due to his attraction to Magda "Mrs Nowak" who confesses that she is only his assistant in the clinic. And to top it all off (although there is more and in order not to be exhaustive) Irena, numb to her commitments and concerts in the United States without being happy, without envisioning a reason for being to hold onto to use her as a raft or paddle in her existential drift. . I don't think I'm morbid because I liked Nowak's fatal heart attack at the end; in the end, which, as Kawalerowicz is accustomed to, is not an ending but a chess move that awaits the spectator's. Irena's songs are beautifully cut but pessimistic and the cinematography is perfect for the idea.