Director; Anna Kazejak (Poland). Year of Release: 2022
The dining room of an anonymous ferry. The décor is as drab as you’d expect. A woman stands with her back to the bar while children run around. As the barman comes with her order, a man approaches her and starts chatting. They look at a man and a younger woman sitting at a table and say: “they seem to be getting along OK, don’t they?”
Maja and Hubert are Polish couple. They taking their young boys, Eryk and Wiktor, on holiday to a camping park on Bornholm, a Danish island. Accompanying them are Dawid, an old friend, Dawid’s new girlfriend, Nina, who studied Psychology (this – and being blonde – is about the only distinguishing feature which Nina is allowed to have). Dawid has also brought his son Kaj, Kaj normally lives with his mother, but is going away with dad for the first time.
An early scene sets the mood. The party arrives at the caravan park, and go to their allocated spot. It has already been occupied by a Swedish family. When Hubert and Dawid start to remonstrate, one of the Swedes – a pregnant woman – tells them that they’ve unpacked their stuff and put up their tents, so why don’t Maja and Hubert and Co find another spot in the relatively empty campsite?
There are at least 3 ways of reacting to this scene, but let’s start with the most obvious ones. You could be outraged at the audacity and thoughtlessness of the Swedes. In which case, you’re very much on Team Maja and Hubert. They eventually, and reluctantly, do find an alternative place, but boy do they look moody about it. Maja, in particular seems to have, as they say round here, a stick up her arsen, always fussing about trivial matters.
The second possible reaction is to laugh in a superior manner at the overzealous behaviour of the Poles. In which case, you’re probably the sort of person that the film was made for. It’s main purpose seems to be to show insufferable middle class prigs and to hold them up to ridicule. Maja and Hubert and Dawid and Nina are shown warts and all, and the audience is only rarely invited to sympathise with them. It’s like Mike Leigh, but without the humour or humanity.
There is also a third way of reacting to this scene, and indeed to most of the film. This is not to give a toss what happens to these people. You don’t hate them because it’s hard to raise up that much emotion about them. As we watch the slow deterioration of Maja and Hubert’s relationship, and realise that Dawid and Nina never had too much in common in the first place, it’s hard to care, as you never really felt much for the characters.
This makes it difficult when real problems occur. After a night in the tent with the other two boys, Eryk becomes withdrawn and quiet. Both his parents try to find out what’s wrong, initially unsuccessfully. Then Eryk effectively accuses Kaj of sexual abuse. Maja bans her sons from camping any more, much to the annoyance of Wiktor, who doesn’t want to spend any more time than is absolutely necessary with his prissy parents.
This is where everything starts to unravel. Relationships between the two couples become strained, although more accurately, the strained relationship is more between Maja and everyone else. Hubert and Dawid are perfectly happy to sit in the children’s play area and bemoan their problems over a couple of cans of beer, before the pregnant Swede arrives and tells them off for (a) drinking beer, and (b) being in the play area in the first place.
At this stage, the film makes a slight tilt in favour of Maja. We have seen most of the film through her eyes, but until now, these have been the eyes of an irritable privileged woman. Suddenly we now see her isolation in a loveless marriage and the general uselessness of her husband. When she and Nina cycle to the nearest pub and she gets pissed and flirts with a passing beardy man with a motor bike, you sort of see where she’s coming from.
While all this is happening, Hubert and Dawid bumble along in the background. They are largely interchangeable characters. I don’t mean that they look alike, but maybe they do – middle aged white men all tend to look the same to me. But their behaviour is indistinguishable, looking on hapless as chaos reigns. Maybe it’s a step forward that this is a film where it is the male characters who get the underwritten parts.
Ultimately, though, my main reaction to the film was a big So What. Its being marketed as a black comedy, but it’s just not funny enough to be an effective comedy, and the supposed darkness is not vicious enough. I presume that you’re supposed to laugh at the characters with a feeling of familiarity – that they are like your flawed friends. But these are not my people. Ultimately I don’t care what happens to them.
This is a shame. There are a lot of new films out at the moment, and I chose this one because there seemed to be something about it. The trailer was intriguing. Reading about it afterwards, it seems to have been trying to be one of those depressing cynical Scandinavian films about how shitty life is. I like that sort of film. But for such films to work, you must feel something for the main characters – love, hate, anger, whatever. Here, I’m afraid that I only felt indifference.
Fucking Bornholm had all the elements of being a well-made interesting film. But the characters were too dull and smug to glue these elements together. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. In the end, it just wasn’t.
CinePhil 