Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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BARTOSZ KRUHLIK: SUPERNOVA (2019) - KINO POLSKA

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MARCIN HYCNA IN SUPERNOVA

A finely crafted disaster on a country road

In movies, a shitstorm can be a thing of admirable construction, which some directors approach with a fine sense of craft. Such is the case here. Supernova is about a terrible multi-victim accident on a country road in the middle of a summer Sunday. All is bright and clear. The event itself takes only a fragment of the short feature length run-time. In fact it happens before we know it. But what unfolds is a fine twittering machine of interconnected explosions and implosions.

At first, a couple is fighting. The woman, with only a sling bag and her two small children, is leaving her drunken, whiney husband Michal. She is simply walking away down the road. He tries to stop her, desperately, and she hesitates, yielding to his embrace, but then goes on.

Suddenly there's a fancy new Audi and three bodies scattered on the road - the mother and the two kids. It's a hit-and-run. Only not quite. The driver is still there, but he is not interested in helping the victims, though he checks them briefly. The mother appears alive.

This is a country road, but it can't be far from civilization. Three layers of cops come, and several layers of medical help, and later a crowd from town, eventually a news camera. Finally, because the guilty driver is a government official, henchmen come, including a lawyer with long hair and a fancy suit. The most particular aspects of this event are, first, that there are a number of people present connected personally to the victims, and, second, that the political status of the perpetrator leads him to function in a particular way. He will think he has everything under control, or that is what he'll tell himself and others. Later, and in this environment hostile to him and friendly to the victims his illusion of invulnerablity will gradually evaporate.

The movie is about the social interactions that unfold from this one sudden tragic event. The senior of the first two cops to come is a cousin of the victims. He is a good example of how we observe people for a while before knowing what's going on with them. He looks worried and disturbed, but we don't know why for a while.

Among the citizens who later come to the scene, an older one is the grandfather. The senior ranking officer of all the policeman, in plain clothes, also an older man, is faced with a hideous dilemma, because he will have the burden of protecting the guilty politician, but his connections are local. He is screwed, and what's worse, this has happened when he was on the brink of retirement. The drunken husband is still there and he complicates things immensely. But so does the older cop who is a relative. This is Catholic country, and a priest comes and holds a ceremony that provides satisfaction to the numerous troubled locals.

Surprisingly, but interestingly for the action, the perpetrator of the accident, Adam Nowak (Marcin Hycnar) himself goes through a whole series of layered moods, à la Kübler-Ross, as if going through stages of denial and grief for the demise of his own reputation. The youngest cop, though forbidden to do so, has plunged into the Audi on his own initiative and found the vehicle's detachable mini camera not only with the accident recorded on it but the bonus of a louche sex scene enacted on the hood a short time earlier.

First time director Kruhli, also the writer, experienced from nine prize-wining shorts and working with his regular dp Michal Dymek, does a fine job here of wringing maximum drama and surprise from multiple players in a complex action drama without anything ever seeming strained or false. While it's not that none of this could happen during the same narrow time sequence, we are specially privileged by the filmmaker to be able to move around, observing the juiciest moments. And the pace is very good.

Supernova, 78 mins., with Marek Braun, Marcin Hycnar, Marcin Zarzeczny, debuted at Gdynia Polish Film Festival Sept. 16, 2019, showing also in at least nine other festivals including Santa Barbara, Glasgow, Dublin and Cheltenham. Screened for this review as part of the seven-film virtual Brooklyn Academy of Music Apr. 30-May 6, 2021 Kino Polska series.

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


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