Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Bartek Bala
Starring: Roma Gasiorowska, Eryk Lubos, Adam Wojciechowski, Antonina
Litwiniak
I've never had faith in the smug chestnut which suggests that when people
travel afar they "find themselves." In my experience, a lot of people who
travel essentially "lose something" of themselves; allowing an extended
holiday they once took to form an immutable corner stone of their ongoing
personality. I'm not referring to anyone who has ever been on a plane or a
boat here, but instead the crushing bores who define themselves by the
extended stretch of time they spent as a Westerner in, say, Southeast
Asia, indulging in every unimaginative cliché offered by jaded tourist
commerce, and expecting you to sit there rapt while they recount their
holiday experiences as if they're the first person to ever smoke weed in a
Goa trance party ("I spent six months in India teaching English as a
foreign language," they'll say, and wait expectantly, as if the statement
alone is enough in and of itself to inspire awe). It's a practice most
effectively skewered in 2000's The Beach, which would make an intriguing double bill with the superlative
Swarm, Bartek Bala's (with script help from Maciej Slowinski)
dark doppelganger to the millennial pop wanderlust of Boyle's film (or is
it "Boyle's film"? The Beach is on iPlayer at the mo and I
knocked it on while doing some ironing the other afternoon. Watching it
all this time later is fascinating - it is a film completely at odds with
itself as Boyle's visually striking intentions and the lingering
black-eyed self-loathing of Garland's original novel vie unsuccessfully
against DiCaprio's misplaced play as a romantic lead, all making for
shipwreck mess of conflicting authorship).
The underlying suggestion of The Beach is that a certain
type of travelling was never really about interaction with different
cultures or an integration with other people, but instead the tourist's
self-serving entitlement: a presumption of their own little fiefdom, which
they recreate in the image of their own ego, breath-taken with the volume
of elevenerifeing their experience will duly afford them (it all goes to
shit, after all, due to Richard's inability to not boast about the titular
pure shores). Far from being a collective adventure, this sort of
relocation is a competitive, egocentric individualism, and perhaps the
trope of the summer, too, as another example is the hairbrained midlife
crisis of the dad in the recent Kensuke's Kingdom, a climacteric which involves taking his family on an amateur cross
global sail towards inevitable disaster. In Bala's masterpiece (a debut
feature, no less), there is none of the pastel colouring of Neil Boyle and
Kirk Hendry's pleasant enough animation, nor the vibrant verdant forests
and viridian oceans of the DiCaprio film. Instead, Swarm is
a cruel, colourless milieu. We open with a father (Eryk Lubos) and
teenage son (Adam Wojciechowski) violently wrestling in choppy
waves upon an ashen beach. A mother (Roma Gasiorowska) and younger
daughter (Antonina Litwiniak) watch with concern as the ostensible
play turns into a more brutal spectacle. It becomes apparent that the
mother (the screenplay only refers to the characters by their archetypal
familial roles) sleeps with a knife secreted next to her bed. A few
moments later we will witness her beat to death a fox that has killed two
of the chickens within the small holding where the family live, before she
vividly pukes up. There is no paradise to be lost here.
An early intertitle warns to "control your soul's thirst for freedom"
(actually, in the film's native Polski, it reads, "Poskromcie w sobie
pragnienie wolnosc," which could be more accurately translated as
"restrain your desire for freedom": a more poetically fitting introduction
to this film's imperative exploration of hubris), and throughout the film
we see the island where the family exist from a high bird's eye view,
pinning the land down like a small animal. Viewing far off ships with
suspicion, the quartet survive on the remote land at the behest of the
father; a living arrangement which, according to a log scored in similar
fashion to how prisoners count time in old cartoons, has been ongoing for
some time. The son, at that age where the sap begins to rise, seeks
flight, and the mother, finding herself with child again, does not want to
doom another pregnancy to the primordial atoll (the daughter, in an
enaction of symbolic irony, nurses a broken bird to health by keeping it
in a cage...). Father has none of it: after choking his son for the crime
of building a little fishing raft, he aggressively expounds how they are
not only "living differently" for themselves but the "others who will come
after us," with the real world to be misgiven as a "chaos that calls."
As fitting to our concurrent annual Shyamalance, a film which
Swarm recalls is the Philadelphian auteur's
The Village with the characters of that film's deliberate
luddite outlook echoed here. Yet while the denizens of that closed society
were heartbroken idealists (key to MNS is his tenderness, his genuine
sentimentality), here Father is a corrupted idealogue who uses fear and
the masculine advantage of physical strength to subjugate (how, you wonder
with icky horror, are there to be "others to come after"...). That is, at
least until it becomes visible that he's unwell, the sort of unwell which
involves coughing up blood. Mother attempts a (well-staged) palliation
involving cupping, but the unit suspect that the game is up, and that his
time is becoming short... Will the potential death of the patriarch allow
the remaining family to escape, or will the son, indoctrinated into this
regime from birth, see opportunity for his own imperial dominance
(involving, yes, some "bespoke" ideas concerning propagation)?
Never has the bleak been filmed so beautifully: Zuzanna Kernbach's
interiors exhibit the sinister warmth of candlelight and shadows, while
the exterior sequences are frequently plunged into the non-negotiable
depths of the sea, with coolly unforgiving aquatic scenes. Be warned, with
images of enforced abortion and animal death, this film is a deeply harsh
watch (and deeply, you know, Polish). Yet at the oasis centre of
Swarm is Gąsiorowska, whose urgent beauty and feminine
dignity provide the emotional core of this film, which essays a toxic
patriarchy with unflinching focus (its mad how much Mother's children look
like her, too, securing the hermetic feel). Ok, there are moments where
the film stumbles (notably when the - good - score obtrusively tells us
how we should be responding to the on-screen action), but overall this is
stunning stuff. In a summer in which Britain and beyond has witnessed male
violence against women, riots engendered by violent men and (just as I am
writing this sentence!) the cancellation of a series of concerts from a
female singer, which would be chiefly attended by women and girls, due to
the threat of male violence; Swarm presents a pertinent
parable from which apparently no wanderlust can provide flight.
Swarm plays at the 2024 Vashon
Island Film Festival on August 9th.
