The emotional inertia and chaos affecting a narcoleptic woman, a fatally ill writer and a doctor, and their attempts to escape from their dead-end situations.
Drowsiness (2008)
Senność (original title)
Sennosc / Drowsiness is the second feature in the young director’s output. We waited four years; does it come up to expectations? Has Magdalena Piekorz successfully cleared the “second film threshold”, allegedly the most difficult in any director’s career? The audience’s reaction at the Gdynia festival left no room for doubt; Piekorz’s film was applauded the longest of all the films in the competition – Drowsiness won the Golden Claqueur.
This is how Magdalena Piekorz presents her film in an interview (available in the distributor’s materials):
‘Drowsiness’ is a story about people who realize at some point in their lives that they are shouldering a burden, a cross, which is weighing down on them too much. They feel at a dead end, but meeting others with similar problems makes them look differently at reality and decide to change something. The film has three main characters – Róza who suffers from narcolepsy and suspects her husband of cheating on her, Robert who is a writer and realizes that the relationship he’s been in for many years is an unfulfilling one, and the family into which he has married is completely different mentally from him – they are hard to live with and oppressive. There’s also the story of Adam who, though he has very good relations with his parents – simple people – decides to leave his family home and move to the city. First and foremost, though, he discovers his identity, his real self, and takes the first serious step towards being true to himself. And this is what the film is about – that it’s worth being true to yourself in life. The sooner you start acting in accordance with your own conscience and morals, instead of acting against them, the easier it becomes to achieve genuine happiness.”
Piekorz’s film can be seen as three intertwined stories about contemporary thirty-year-olds at a crossroads in their lives: each of them faces overwhelming challenges. You can also see the film as a metaphor of a generation entangled in the rat race: the world belongs to the winners. But, the winners are few – what about the rest? Perhaps we need to admit openly that not everyone is suited for the rat race, but everyone is entitled to happiness. How can it be achieved? The first – most difficult – step is to be honest with yourself; to make a gesture of honesty which will become the key to your inner self, to liberation in a broad sense.
Audiences gave Drowsiness a good reception, seeing it as a useful reminder of a few familiar truths that we tend to forget in the heat of the rat race. Critics, on the other hand, were put off by the work’s excessively literary character, which shouldn’t come as a surprise given the strong creative personality of writer Wojciech Kuczok, the screenplay’s author. It’s worth highlighting the film’s “Altmanesque” structure and the division into three parts marked by the work of Marcin Koszalka’s camera – the story of Róza the actress is told in the mood of a nightmare, the tale of Robert seems grotesque, while the story of Adam, the doctor who musters the courage to admit he is different, breathes realism. Drowsiness is one of those projects we could call a “generation film”: portraying a specific generation and providing it with food for thought.
