Poland post-World War II. The widowed Emilia and her mother who has an infected leg try to survive in a small one-room apartment. The city is plagued by poverty, robbery and ruins, yet Emilia tries to earn money by baking cookies. Emilia meets US soldier Norman who is searching for the grave of executed Allied soldiers. Even though Emilia doesn't speak English, and Norman doesn't speak Polish, they fall in love. He wants to take her to Berlin, and from there on to the US, to live on his farm. Realizing she doesn't have the money to pay a smuggler to transfer both of them outside Poland, the mother opens windows during cold nights and refuses to take penicilin, and therefore dies faster. Emilia cedes her emigration place to prostitute Stella and thus doesn't show up at the train station where Norman was waiting for her. Decades later, an old Emilia lives in a retirement home run by nuns, and is informed that she inherited money from the US. She falls unconscious, and hallucinates that she is dancing with Norman in Monument Valley.
Included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, Krzysztof Zanussi's quiet and minimalist drama of an American-Polish couple in post-war Poland is a good little film, yet it feels dated and too banal by today's time. The simplistic story never manages to engage on a higher level, among others due to too many moments when it falls into the trap of melodrama, yet it features a lot of symbolism which was hidden and was understandable only to Polish and Eastern European countries during that time—the US soldier who wants to save the poor Emilia by taking her to the West where she will have a better life was interpreted as the Western democracy trying to pull Poland out of Communist dictatorship and poverty into a better system, which was bold during that era, and this is why in Poland "A Year of the Quiet Sun" was referenced after the fall of Communism seven years later. There are some interesting details here and there (Emilia watches as a landmine explodes in the mud after it was triggered by a chain dragged through the ground by a cow that just keeps on walking; Norman and Emilia going to the attic at night with just a candle to have intimacy, as he covers them with his jacket due to winter cold), yet mostly the story plays out straightforward, without much ingenuity or an enriching style that would upgrade it. The final two sequences involving an elegant transition / time jump and a dream scene are impressive, playing with the motive of Poland who suffered through a terrible past and is about to suffer even more in the Communist present, yet more inspiration and sense of cinema would have been welcomed.
Grade:++
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