1991-2000ArthouseDorota KedzierzawskaDramaPoland

Dorota Kedzierzawska – Wrony AKA Crows (1994)

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Quote:
A kidnapped happiness

In Wrony (Crows, 1994), the central place is given once again to a little girl, this time set against the background of a small town. It also is a film about love, but this time about the absence of it. Wrona, the skinny and mouthy girl of a fragile build with a face of both an innocent and a scamp, kidnaps another little girl (Maleństwo) from the neighbourhood. She does so in order to find someone to love and to be loved herself.

Dorota Kedzierzawska’s Wrony (Crows, 1994)
Young “mother” and “daughter”
Wrona, whose mother is tired, busy and has virtually no spare minute, intuitively comes to the conclusion that giving someone love gives her the right to get some of it back. The question that arises is: how can someone who did not experience much love themselves provide it for another? We witness the absorbing mixture of tenderness and aggression, playfulness and rebuking, cheerful pranks, grumbling helplessness and resourceful drive. She wants the kidnap to be “for life,” to give Maleństwo or to pretend to give, at least for a while, a place in her life and fill it with everyday exertions and fuss. Thus she can evoke an illusion of the longed for reality missing in her own life.

Once again, the film is set in a provincial town. Simplicity, roughness and signs of impoverishment are implanted not so much as to make a point about it as a cause of the situation, but rather to underline the frailty of the girls. A characteristic feature of Kędzierzawska’s films is the contrast built between an alluring portrayal of the world and the roughness of the characters’ immediate surroundings. In Wrony, it is a poor, insular Polish town by the sea; in Diabły, diabły, it is a remote village situated in lush, green but empty fields; later, in the film Nic (Nothing, 1998), it is a big city, an old town house and the difficult life which is led there.

This environmental desolation common to Kędzierzawska’s films is not a theme or course of action, it is part of an ideal landscape for framing peoples’ inadequacies, problems and the solitude encountered by strong personalities striving for individual independence with powerful instincts for life. The presence of poverty reveals plainness, the core of existence without its civilised accessories—with no sophistication or makeup. It prevents the distortion of an image. Wrona is coarse not because she is poor, but because there is nothing to obscure this roughness with (e.g. a nice dress).

On the other hand, the sophistication of Kędzierzawska’s workmanship produces a visual fête. In Wrony, the refrain of running girls accompanied by a musical leit-motif recalls the children in Diabły, diabły. The same shots against the sun which make shilouettes of the children, the dramatic, spirit-like and typically spacious shots set amongst the freedom of nature and the rickety trees and the never ending, empty seaside. Such aesthetics create a fairy tale out of originally grim surroundings.

Once again, the film is set in a provincial town. Simplicity, roughness and signs of impoverishment are implanted not so much as to make a point about it as a cause of the situation, but rather to underline the frailty of the girls. A characteristic feature of Kędzierzawska’s films is the contrast built between an alluring portrayal of the world and the roughness of the characters’ immediate surroundings. In Wrony, it is a poor, insular Polish town by the sea; in Diabły, diabły, it is a remote village situated in lush, green but empty fields; later, in the film Nic (Nothing, 1998), it is a big city, an old town house and the difficult life which is led there.

This environmental desolation common to Kędzierzawska’s films is not a theme or course of action, it is part of an ideal landscape for framing peoples’ inadequacies, problems and the solitude encountered by strong personalities striving for individual independence with powerful instincts for life. The presence of poverty reveals plainness, the core of existence without its civilised accessories—with no sophistication or makeup. It prevents the distortion of an image. Wrona is coarse not because she is poor, but because there is nothing to obscure this roughness with (e.g. a nice dress).

On the other hand, the sophistication of Kędzierzawska’s workmanship produces a visual fête. In Wrony, the refrain of running girls accompanied by a musical leit-motif recalls the children in Diabły, diabły. The same shots against the sun which make shilouettes of the children, the dramatic, spirit-like and typically spacious shots set amongst the freedom of nature and the rickety trees and the never ending, empty seaside. Such aesthetics create a fairy tale out of originally grim surroundings.






http://nitroflare.com/view/E2451B543155F7A/Wrony.mkv

Language(s):Polish
Subtitles:English sub/idx muxed

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