Wednesday, January 10, 2024 - 12:33am
`Loving': A powerfully intense true story from Poland
Maria and Tomek are a contemporary Polish power couple. She has an important job in promotion and development with the city council, and she’s great at it. Handsome hubby Tomek is a successful architect, looking for more municipal contracts. They’ve got financial stability, a nifty new house, and they clearly love each other. She’s pregnant---very pregnant, in fact, just a few weeks from delivery. What could derail their happy train to a bright future?
Her powerful boss, the Mayor. He has been pestering her with emails and inappropriate text messages (“I wish it was my baby,” says one). Lately, he seems to be more obsessed---even openly, at parties---and has now started stalking her. It’s freaking her out.
“Can’t you see he’s hitting on me?” she complains one night to the sweetly attentive Tomek, but he laughs it off: “What’s wrong with him finding you attractive? I sure do!”
A terrible encounter soon proves it was no laughing matter. Maria tries but fails to keep it a secret. The birth of her child is followed by far more stress and post-partum depression than usual. When Tomek inevitably discovers what happened, his wife---and whole life---seem to change. Suspicion, and the cancer called jealousy, take over. This couple and their marriage have been poisoned by a crime.
Based on an actual (much-publicized) case in the Polish city of
Praise the Lord for the bottomless well of fine Polish films---arguably the best in
It’s not giving too much away to say that what could’ve been just another grim “blame the victim” cautionary tale ends on an uplifting eternal-maternal note of baptismal forgiveness: the taking away of original and unoriginal sin alike.
No mean achievement. No film more worth seeing in this year’s Three Rivers Film Festival.
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