10 May 2021

Agnieszka Smoczyńska's Fuga | Fugue (2018)

A youngish woman (Gabriela Muskala) pushes her way up to a subway station platfrom in Warsaw after crossing the rails on foot and the proceeds to openly piss on the floor of the platform. The authorities take in this obviously mentally disturbed woman whose name is Alicya, although she has no memory of her past. It's only in a highly improbable TV progamme in which missing people appear in person that her father recognises her as his daughter Kinga who disappeared two years before.

The reunion is strained as she has no recollection of her previous identity. She is cold towards husband Krzysztof (Lukasz Simlat) and her young son Daniel (Iwo Rajski). Her main interest seems to be in getting her identity card and leaving. Krzysztof is amazed that she can remember where the fuse box is but doesn't recognise her family, although the fuse reflex is of course just a motor mechanism. She learns that Ewa (Malgorzata Buczkowska), quite possibly the new woman in her husband's life, is (as Kinga used to be) a geography teacher. Slowly she begins to thaw: unexpectedly, she sucks Krzysztof to climax, has sex with him, and they begin behaving like a conventional family, although she has strange inexplicable bouts of madness and pukes a black substance, obviously still in distress.

Two years before she had a road accident, thought she had killed her son and then just disappeared. For two years she had a new identity, many things have changed with her trauma, and she can't return to her old normality and pretend to herself and others that nothing has happened: she has to leave. A gripping, stunning second feature by Agnieszka Smoczyńska.

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