Violence, exuberance and sexuality, director Andrzej Zulawski suggests, are the key ingredients of Chamanka. Adapted from a provocative, but hugely successful, Polish novel, it is the story of a 30 year-old anthropology professor (played by Boguslaw Linda, arguably the most charismatic Polish actor since Zbigniew Cybulski) with two obsessions: one is a beautiful young Italian student (Iwona Petri) he meets by chance at Cracow Railway Station; the other, more disturbingly, the 3,000 year-old, perfectly preserved body of a Shaman he and his colleagues have recently dragged out of a swamp.
A French/Polish co-production, Chamanka underlines Zulawski's commitment to pushing back aesthetic boundaries. He has always been a maverick. Like his mentor, Andrzej Wajda, he was frequently in trouble with the authorities in Poland during the Communist era. Two of his films, The Silver Globe and The Devil, were banned. Much of his subsequent work has been done in France, but has often proved equally contentious.
Zulawski was eager to make a film which touched on themes beyond the pale in contemporary cinema, namely irrationalism, necrophilia and mysticism. Linda's character starts the film like a typical modern European. He's the bourgeois everyman; an academic, sceptical about life and out of touch with his spiritual side. But his research into shamen and his erotically charged affair with the Italian woman shake him out of his certainties.
Not that the film breaks all the rules. On one level, it's a simple, if very intense, love story; a drama about how romantic obsession is both benign and potentially very destructive. “The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact,” Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Zulawski's lyrical, morbid tale suggests that sentiment still has some currency. Geoffrey Macnab
Prod co: Le Studio Canal+, Pologne, Serena
Films Prod: Jacky Ouaknine, Chris Bolzzi
Dir: Andrzej Zulawski
Scr: Manuela Gretkowska
Ph: Andrzej Jaroszwicz
Prod des: Tom Conroy
Mus: Kirzinjki Cast: Iwani Petri, Boguslaw Linda
Running time: 108 mins
Int'l sales: Le Studio Canal+
[Home ] [Content ] [The Sponsors ] [The Team ] [Comments ] [Help ]
