Woman on the Roof

Kobieta na dachu

VERDICT: In writer-director Anna Jadowska’s sensitive whydunit, veteran Polish actress and Tribeca winner Dorota Pomykala plunges the viewer into psychological  depths in her deftly nuanced portrait of a 60-year-old who tries to rob a bank with a kitchen knife.

Anna Jadowska has been making movies about ordinary people desperate to feel loved since her 2003 debut Touch Me looked at the misguided loves of just about everybody. In Woman on the Roof (Kobieta na dachu) she focuses on the accumulated unhappiness of Mirka, a hospital obstetrician who finds herself without a friend in the world when a foolish gesture overturns her life. The subtle poignancy of Dorota Pomykala’s portrait of the classic “invisible woman” over 60 won her an award at Tribeca for best performance in an international narrative feature. Empathetic and well-made, this Polish-French-Swedish coprod is a class act, though the subject of a depressed older woman battling society, her family and her inner demons is not the stuff box office hits are made of. It should find appreciation with festival followers.

In a few telling shots, Jadowska sets the action in a sprawling concrete residence building in a city suburb. At first it seems that Mirka lives alone in her apartment, and it comes as quite a surprise to later learn she has a husband and an adult son. But it’s as though they weren’t there, with the lack of human warmth and interaction they exchange. When Mirka climbs onto the extensive roof of the building and inches toward the edge as the camera looks down from a dizzying height, her loneliness appears to have won.

But this is just the prelude (or flashforward?) of an intimate, original story that plunges deep into the main character’s mental depression, which goes hand in hand with society’s disinterest in and rejection of older women past child-bearing age. The way the screenplay gradually reveals information keeps the audience guessing about how mentally stable Mirka really is, and several times shifts our perception of this ordinary-extraordinary woman. An example is the timid, almost fearful way she leaves her apartment and sidles down the street avoiding people. After nervously buying some fish food in a pet store, she enters an empty bank and, in the most awkward way possible, tells the solitary bank teller to give her money. She flashes a small kitchen knife to back up her demand.

Though she chickens out when the employee calls the cops, this pathetically crazy and random act marks the rest of Mirka’s life, landing her progressively in jail, in court and in a psychiatric hospital. The storytelling is so confidently laid back and Pomykala’s performance is so highly convincing – sometimes introverted and listless, sometimes anxious and extreme – that there is an inevitability about what happens. The suspense, if one can call it that, rests entirely on how Mirka will react. Cruelly rebuffed by her self-centered husband Julek (Bogdan Koca), her devious, unaffectionate son Mariusz (Adam Bobik) and a rarely-seen sister, she is left to cope on her own in a moment of crisis. The scant, carefully dosed dialogue underscores that there is no love or even kindness in the family. “Have you lost your mind?” the bottled-up Julek demands incredulously when she tries to cuddle in bed, naked.

Though for a while we, too, are allowed to doubt her sanity, there is a motive behind Mirka’s comically ineffectual hold-up attempt. But its revelation half-way through the film changes little, merely underlining how tawdry loneliness can be, in a person no longer deemed sexually desirable or lovable. Pomykala reveals her aging body in several discreet nude scenes, but her greater reveal is the psychological stripping she performs as she begs for help and encounters only cold incivility. Mirka is not a well-read thinker who can rationalize herself out of a horrible situation but a rather naïve woman who, in some very fine plot turns in the final scenes, does a remarkable job of demanding her rightful place in the world.

The film is notable for its rigorous, low-key shooting style in a world of pastel colors that seem bled of all vitality, courtesy of cinematographer Ita Zbroniec-Zajt. High level tech work makes a big contribution to the general atmosphere and undercurrents of meaning.

Director, screenwriter: Anna Jadowska
Cast: Dorota Pomykala, Bogdan Koca, Adam Bobik, Agnieszka Suchora
Producers: Maria Blicharska Martin-Lacroix, Damien McDonald, Mimi Spang, Anna-Maria Kantarius
Cinematography: Ita Zbroniec-Zajt
Production design: Anna Pabisiak
Costume design: Maja Skrzypek
Editing: Julia Gregory, Piotr Kmiecik
Music: Katharina Nuttall
Sound design: Vincent Verdoux
Production companies: Donten & Lacroix Films (Poland), Blick Productions (France), Garagefilm (Sweden)
World sales: Loco Films
Venue: Tribeca Film Festival (International competition)
95 minutes