THE REVIEW OF THE FILM "THE END OF THE WORLD" BY MONIKA PAWLUCZUK
The main protagonist of the latest film by Monika Pawluczuk is... the radio, and to be precise, one of the nightly broadcasts in Radio Łódź. It is in the course of this broadcast that the end of the world is to come, according to the Mayan calendar. We listen intently to intimate conversations of the listeners of the radio broadcast, in which the host asks them about their own end of the world.
For many people, loss of a close person is their end of the world, for some - some peculiar moment from their childhood which branded their adult life. At the same time, we observe the work of emergency ambulance service dispatcher; this night, people look for consolation calling also this number. These two are complemented by the character of a taxi driver, in whose car a peculiar dialogue with the nightly broadcast is held.
The title of the film by Pawluczuk is tricky. At the first moment, it brings to mind the whole mass of catastrophic films with eye-catching special effects, but only a brief glance at "The End of the World" fully represents the atmosphere of the entire film - the mood of meditation, subtle immersion in the inner lives of the protagonists, as well as in ourselves. The end of the world was treated only as a pretext, pretext for conversation, for opening oneself to others and telling them about something important in one's life. These conversations in the film by Pawluczuk take on a universal dimension, for almost an hour we listen carefully to the stories of several people, at the same time we get the impression that it is the voice of one person. It is to a large extent thanks to the director's approach to the image, the author gives up the intrusive poetics of reportage, and instead presents the shots from city monitoring and blurred film frames of the housing estates at night. In this way, irrelevant details are lost, such as faces, surnames, all kinds of labels, and what comes to the foreground is that what is the most beautiful in human beings and the most precious for every documentary film-maker.