A Year of the Quiet Sun

A Year of the Quiet Sun – Rigorously, scrupulously morose, Krystof Zanussi’s A Year of the Quiet Sun (1984) dramatizes a famous remark made by Kafka to Max Brod: “Yes, there is hope, an abundance of hope – but not for us.” In the charred ruins of a Polish city, a widow lives with her crippled and ailing mother. An American soldier, apparently working to identify the blackened remains of Allied airmen buried in a mass grave nearby – a place that is given frequent and morbidly detailed visualization in this film – befriends the woman. A Hollywood movie would have the couple “meet cute;” in this film, the two meet when the hero almost urinates in her face. The American is so muted and miserable that its hard to assess his exact motives, but he professes undying love for the woman and tries to persuade her to flee across the border and meet him in Berlin. (Since the woman’s husband is missing in the war, she can’t really establish that she is single and, therefore, able to marry the soldier – in effect, the movie’s plot is driven by an immigration law problem.) It all ends tragically with hopes and dreams dashed to pieces. This is the kind of grim film where the lovers enjoy only two moments of happiness – a dance in some sort of Polish opera house reprised in the movie’s last minute in a post-mortem waltz set in heaven, which improbably turns out to be Monument Valley. Zanussi’s scenario is so relentlessly unhappy that he, even, manages to make Monument Valley looks overcast, cold, and miserable – the dead characters’ feet kicks up frigid-looking red dust. The picture is beautifully filmed in Rembrandt tones: it is dark, the images, like the burnt-up hovels, seared around the edges. There are some interesting moments in the film and the picture takes chances: the lovers are middle-aged and not attractive, the camera hovers clinically over their love scenes and the barest flesh visible is the prominent bald spot on the leading man’s skull. A scene in which Polish peasants gawking at the mass grave get too close and start pitching into the pit to roll around with the tarry decomposed remains of the dead airmen is impressive and, even, funny in a macabre way. And, near the end of the film, there is a rendition of Amazing Grace that is one of the best I have ever seen for matching image to sound: when the singer says that he has “come through” many trials, we believe him. Unfortunately, the picture is too relentlessly sad to recommend: this is the kind of movie in which a cow, when we see it harmlessly ambling across a country road, is going to step onto a land mine and be blown up a few instants after it is shown cheerlessly chewing its cud. (Not to fear: the movie was made before CGI and the cow’s interaction with the mine is almost comically inept – there’s a big colorful blast, that doesn’t seem to discomfit the cow in the least.