pretty cinematography doesn't make for a good movie

Take that away and all you get is a boring, fragmented, underdeveloped, lifeless love story with nothing you can grasp onto.

The biggest problem with this movie is that it has no narrative cohesion. It just breezes past huge gaps in our protagonists' lives at its whim with no attention paid towards making its star-crossed romance seem real. I usually applaud movies for restraint and choosing to use the art of subtlety to sell its emotions, rather than big, tear-jerky moments. But this film went way too far in that route.

This movie has the tendency to only imply things that should have been clearly shown. For example, when Zuzanna's relationship with Wiktor begins to crumble, instead of showing us the full extent of her jealousy of his past lovers consume her, we just get one scene of her telling him that she had an affair, and that's it. Imagine how much more interesting it would've been to actually see the relationship gradually fall apart. There are many other moments like this throughout the film, like when Zuzanna manages to get Wiktor freed by marrying Kaczmarek, which is also only briefly implied rather than shown.

There needs to be a balance between the "show, don't tell" approach and basic expository dialogue. When you go too far in one route or another, your film becomes either overly confusing or overly blunt and simplistic. As tired I am of movies with constant exposition, this film could've really used some as there's so many details that were easy to miss that were important to the narrative.

I honestly think if it weren't for the old-school visual aesthetic this film was presented in, it would just be seen as a bad, sloppy movie. The black-and-white, 4:3 aspect ratio gave it this veneer of prestige and quality, making audiences afraid to dismiss it out of fear of being seen as unintelligent. Yet, the actual quality of its storytelling hardly matches that of its cinematography.

Highly disappointed, 5/10.

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