(Grzegorz Królikiewicz, Poland, 1973, 74 minutes)
Why would a couple kill three people who never did them any harm?
In his 1973 feature debut, Polish filmmaker Grzegorz Królikiewicz, who began as a documentarian, provides a spectacularly expressive answer to that question. The result, as cultural critic Ela Bittencourt aptly puts it in the essay included with the new Radiance release, is "complex and invigorating."
I tend to think of experimental films as those without a clear-cut narrative or in which the narrative is scrambled. That isn't the case with Królikiewicz's film, which plays out in chronological order, and has a beginning, a middle, and an end, in addition to two distinct characters, but in most other respects, it's an experimental feature or, more accurately, a narrative feature that incorporates experimental or avant garde techniques.
I say this not just to set the scene, but because I was dazzled by the high-contrast black and white images and discordant sound design, but also confused and frustrated, since I couldn't, at first, figure out who these people were and what was going on. To be sure, things happen, but Królikiewicz prioritizes impressions over conventional narrative beats.
To Polish viewers at the time, it might have made more sense, since Królikiewicz drew from an actual case. Granted, by 1972, when he made the film, the story of Kraków couple Jan and Maria Malisz was old news, since the crime they committed took place in 1933. Nonetheless, the film premiered on the international stage at Cannes where it met with a warm reception.
In their physicality, 25-year-old Jan (Man of Iron's Franciszek Trzeciak) and Maria (Anna Nieborowska) are a study in contrasts. He has thinning hair, a wide forehead, and rounded features, whereas she has straight hair with severely-cut bangs and sharp, angular features. His face is open, hers closed, but the camera loves them both, and they're always compelling even when it isn't clear what's going on, not least since, like New York crime-scene photographer Weegee, DP Bogdan Dziworski often surrounds them with negative space to emphasize their isolation from everyone else, including Jan's judgmental younger brother (Camera Buff's Jerzy Stuhr).
Królikiewicz depicts a few critical weeks in their lives, opening with a raucous house party in cramped quarters that plays like something out of an Aleksei German or Robert Eggers film; it's possible they both live on the same street, or even in the same building. The revelers eat, drink, puke, exchange unpleasantries, and, in one case, pass out before Jan breaks it up.
An aspiring illustrator and architect, Jan arrives the next day, late and unshaven, at the photography studio where he works as an assistant as Janusz Hajdun and Henryk Kuzniak's string-laden score merges with a disturbing squeaking sound–from some kind of machinery, perhaps–that gives way to something more ominous when his boss lets him go.
The director then catches up with Maria, who appears to be waiting for someone, or maybe she just met up with them. She has leaves in her hair as if she slept on the ground, an indirect way of revealing that she's a sex worker. She straightens out her clothes and combs her hair loudly–the loudest, more aggressive hair-combing I've ever heard–but then, as the expression on her face grows angrier, the sound drops away to nothingness.
Królikiewicz continues with these intriguing, if inscrutable vignettes. Jan and Maria visit a church, presumably to get married, followed by an administrative building, where they have an unsatisfying encounter, culminating in a sequence in which Jan sits on a park bench at the bottom of a hill to meet up with Maria. When she arrives, he hits her with a white bird of some kind, a pigeon or a dove, though I have no idea why. (This sequence was deleted from British prints due to 1937's Animal Rights Act.)
It's all meant to be unsettling, and it is, not least the way Królikiewicz places nearly as much emphasis on the texture of objects, like a particularly rough-hewn table, as the posture of a body or the planes of a face.
It's disorienting, to be sure, but it doesn't feel like art for art's sake, so much as an attempt to show a claustrophobic world through jaundiced eyes. A despondent individual isn't likely to spend much time looking up at the sky when they could be staring at a splinter-laden table or the muddy ground.
Jan becomes so despondent he attempts to take his life, but Maria rescues him in the nick of time. For all its challenges, the film is never dull, though this sequence had me on the edge of my seat. It's no spoiler to reveal that Jan doesn't die, because he hasn't yet committed the crime that will make him infamous, but he's lost all hope. In rescuing him, Maria doesn't simply do a good deed--she confirms that she still has faith in their future.
When things don't get better, though, they scheme to rob the postman who delivers pension payments. While their neighbors see the 30-year-old as a bearer of good news, they see him as a living, breathing bank. Even if you sympathize with their plight, it's not like they're targeting a well-endowed institution or wealthy landowner who can absorb the loss. On the contrary.
Only the couple's 47-year-old daughter survives (the braces on her legs suggest polio). The sequence is so frenzied and fractured, it's hard to tell what's going on, not least since the POV alternates between victims and perpetrators. In a way, Michael Powell's 1960 Peeping Tom predicts what the director is doing here, just as it would also predict how Richard Brooks handles the brutal murder that concludes 1977's Looking for Mr. Goodbar.
Though they make their escape, the police catch up to Jan and Maria soon enough. The film ends as they present their respective cases. This remarkable sequence concentrates so intently on their words and faces, that most everything else, including judge and jury, literally fades away into the darkness. The two finally have the chance to explain themselves, and they do.
I won't say what happens other than that their undying love for each other comes through loud and clear. Though the murder reveals them at their very worst, they're at their best here, but by then it's too late.
It's the Van Gogh Syndrome in full effect--Jan might not have turned to such a deperate, futile act if people could have seen the value of his work while he was still able to benefit, though I would imagine his infamy juiced its value. Further, Through and Through isn't the only film to depict a Polish artist whose reputation grew in the wake of a horrific murder. Surrealist painter and photographer Zdzisław Beksiński, however, was the victim and not the perpetrator. Jan P. Matuszyński recreates the whole sordid affair in his 2016 docudrama, The Last Family. If less successful as a film, Beksiński's paintings are quite extraordinary.
In the illuminating interview included with this release, Walerian Borowczyk biographer Michał Oleszczyk claims that comparisons to Arthur Penn's 1967 Bonnie and Clyde and Leonard Castle's 1970 The Honeymoon Killers, both inspired by real cases, make sense, but don't quite fit, and I'm inclined to agree, though I'm not convinced that Terrence Malick's elegiac Badlands, also released in 1973, proves more fitting. Near as I can tell, Charlie Starkweather, both in person and as portrayed by an electric young Martin Sheen, was a bad seed, whereas Jan was an artistic soul who lost his way.
Królikiewicz taught seminars on the French filmmaker, and I can see similarities with 1960's Breathless, which was also inspired by a real case, and 1965's Pierrot le Fou, which also features lovers on the run. The Crime and Punishment comparison proves misleading, however, because unlike Raskolnikov, neither Jan nor Maria has any interest in getting right with God. Though the director's feature hews closer to Italian Neorealism than French (or even Czech) New Wave, he shared Godard's interest in abstraction, ellipses, and misdirection.
In his interview, Oleszczyk goes on to proclaim Through and Through the best Polish film--pretty high praise considering the competition, some of whom are still going strong, like Jerzy Skolimowski, Agnieszka Holland, and Paweł Pawlikowski, all of whom have received Academy Award recognition--in 2014, Pawlikowski won the Best Foreign Language Film award for Ida.
One way or the other, though, it's a singularly shattering achievement.
Through and Through makes its Blu-ray debut courtesy of Radiance Films. Though Królikiewicz passed away in 2017, cinematographer Dziworski oversaw the film's 2K restoration. Supplemental features include three short films–"Everyone Gets What He Doesn't Need" (1966), "Brothers" (1971), and "Don't Cry" (1972). In her excellent essay, "Altered States: The Cinema of Grzegorz Królikiewicz," Ela Bittencourt proclaims 1993's The Case of Bronek Pekosinski as the director's masterpiece, so I hope Radiance gets around to that one, too. I found this paper useful for my research.
Images from Cinema Crazed (Anna Nieborowska), Krowoderska.pl (Jan and Maria Malisz), the IMDb (Franciszek Trzeciak and Nieborowska, alone and with revelers), and Mabumbe (Trzeciak with Jerzy Block as "Old Man").
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