MARCEL AND PAWEL LOZINSKI IN FATHER AND SON

Inward journey

The searching but deceptively simple little documentary Father and Son, in Polish, is little more than a running conversation between Marcel Lozinski, 70, and his son Pawel, 50, as they ride from Poland to Paris traveling and sleeping in a VW van. "Little more" is not meant to suggest this material is ever for a minute trivial. Both men are accomplished documentary filmmakers, who have worked separately and together, and a considerable command of craft is revealed in the way these two artists fuse economy with richness.

There's nowhere to hide in the strung-together conversations in which the dad is sometimes viewed in an unrelenting light by his son, who voices love, but some resentments. This was evidently a bohemian, experimental family, and as happens in such cases, the son has wound up more conservative about child-rearing than his father. Marcel, who was very young when Pawel was born, raised him as an equal, a "little man." This may have been fun, but it had its down side. Marcel recounts stealing a toy locomotive for Pawel when he wanted it and they had no money, a loving, but also irresponsible gesture. There were more substantial gifts: after all, Pawel became a filmmaker like his father. But it emerges that Marcel left for another woman when Pawel was 18, then at times treated Pawel as a father, asking his advice, having him take his brother and a half brother on a vacation, and offering nothing in return. A present-time hint of role reversal comes when Pawel makes his dad get up and wash his teeth one night.

There are warm, nice moments too; the two men love each other. Marcel talks about what a wonderful child Pawel was, adventurous, curious, full of life, taking charge. When he expresses worry about aging and memory loss, Pawel hugs him and kisses him and tells him "don't worry, we'll take care of you; we'll be your memory, your external hard drive."

Marcel spent years in several children's homes in France (evidently hiding, because he was Jewish, though this is not mentioned). He rarely saw his mother, who was in the French resistance, a painful time he has repressed. But he has good memories of France too that they are going to Paris to revisit, and also the burial place of Marcel's mother's ashes in a Paris park. "Enfin, la douce France! Mais oui, regarde ça!" Marcel exclaims as they enter the country. The film ends happily, with a playful hug in a Parisian park. There have been some difficult memories and some tough questions, but one feels this has been a ceremony of reconciliation and love. The film is so spare there are lacunae for us, the viewers, Was Marcel's mother French? Who was his father? How and when did his parents die? Whose suicide does he recount? But the tete-a-tete's intentness in the seanless editing thus is never interrupted, and we watch with bated breath, till the tension dissipates in the final moments.

An elegant motif of memory is a weathered old sepia film (artificially distressed?) showing presumably the father and son and mother long ago, accompanied by Lucienne Delyle's recording of André Claveau's very French, very period 1950 French song Domino about forgiving a frivolous loved one.

Information about this film is limited, but an article at Cultur.Pl summarizes Pawel's life and career. He and Marcel worked together on two films including the 1993 Academy Award-nominated 89 mm od Europy/89 mm from Europe. Pawel's mostly short documentaries (only one feature) are often "simple, intimate films, documenting ordinary peoples' stories." He is inflienced by Krzysztof Kieślowski, with whom he worked on the latter's White. There is another alternate 74 min. version of this documentary credited to Marcel Lozinski entitled Ojciec i syn w podróży/Father and Son on a Journey; both versions have won prizes. The existence of the two versions indicates that father and son could not agree on a common jointly titled film as originally planned.

Father and Son/Ojciec i syn, in Polish, 54 mins., debuted 29 May 2013 at Kracow (where it won the documentary prize), and the two versions have shown at various festivals, also winning prizes at Moscow and Teheran. Screened for this review as part of the 2014 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival where it shows 1 August 2014 at California Theater, Berkeley.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.