Four Nights with Anna (2008), the first movie directed by Jerzy Skolimowski in 17 years, tells the story of Leon, a lonely man who is increasingly attracted towards Anna, a neighbor and co-worker. Unable or unwilling to speak his love, he follows her, spies on her, and devises a way to break into her house in the deep of the night, hovering around Anna's bed while she sleeps.
Anyone who has have the misfortune of being the target of obsessive unrequited love will recognize the movie as an accurate portrait of the grim plight of stalking. Leon perceives reality through the lens of his need for intimacy and proximity. His actions are justified by a deep belief that he is the only person who really cares for Anna. Along the way, he shows total disregard for Anna's privacy, intimacy, feelings, will, and ultimately even for her life.
Significantly, Four Nights with Anna is seldom presented as a movie about stalking. In fact, it has been varied described as "an intimate love story", "an eccentric romance-comedy", or an example of the "cinema of moral concern". Reviewers invariably express their sympathy for Leon, and Kinga Preis, the actress playing Anna, candidly confessed during an interview that she was sorry Leon and Anna didn't stay together at the end.
It is a compliment to Skolimowski's filming skills that the movie manages to remain in the borderline between these two worlds, showing in a masterful way how they can co-exist, and how the stalker's emotional blindness prevents him from detecting the presence of this other reality, one where he does not belong, one whose premises he does not have the right to violate.
Because we, the audience, understand Leon and naturally feel sorry for him, we too become blind to what is going on. In fact, we might be led to even admire Leon for his suffering, his dedication, his self-restrain(!). The movie's greatest achievement is thus to show how we, as a society, confuse stalking for affection, and accept extreme forms of emotional and psychological violence (often degenerating into physical violence and even homicide) as long as they are covered by the gloss of romantic love.
Skolimowski, however, stops short of a full-fledged endorsement of this view. He is thus in a world quite distinct from that inhabited by other film directors who have shown quite lenient views on this same subject, often siding unabashedly with the stalker. Movies such as Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue 6: Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery, or one of Kieslowski's subsequent film The Double Life of Veronique, are a case at point. Another example would be Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express. Unlike Four Nights with Anna, these movies either portrait the stalker as victim (Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery), welcomed mysterious seducer (The Double Life of Veronique), or raise the possibility of a happy end (Chungking Express). Nothing could be further away from reality.
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Anyone who has have the misfortune of being the target of obsessive unrequited love will recognize the movie as an accurate portrait of the grim plight of stalking. Leon perceives reality through the lens of his need for intimacy and proximity. His actions are justified by a deep belief that he is the only person who really cares for Anna. Along the way, he shows total disregard for Anna's privacy, intimacy, feelings, will, and ultimately even for her life.
Significantly, Four Nights with Anna is seldom presented as a movie about stalking. In fact, it has been varied described as "an intimate love story", "an eccentric romance-comedy", or an example of the "cinema of moral concern". Reviewers invariably express their sympathy for Leon, and Kinga Preis, the actress playing Anna, candidly confessed during an interview that she was sorry Leon and Anna didn't stay together at the end.
It is a compliment to Skolimowski's filming skills that the movie manages to remain in the borderline between these two worlds, showing in a masterful way how they can co-exist, and how the stalker's emotional blindness prevents him from detecting the presence of this other reality, one where he does not belong, one whose premises he does not have the right to violate.
Because we, the audience, understand Leon and naturally feel sorry for him, we too become blind to what is going on. In fact, we might be led to even admire Leon for his suffering, his dedication, his self-restrain(!). The movie's greatest achievement is thus to show how we, as a society, confuse stalking for affection, and accept extreme forms of emotional and psychological violence (often degenerating into physical violence and even homicide) as long as they are covered by the gloss of romantic love.
Skolimowski, however, stops short of a full-fledged endorsement of this view. He is thus in a world quite distinct from that inhabited by other film directors who have shown quite lenient views on this same subject, often siding unabashedly with the stalker. Movies such as Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue 6: Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery, or one of Kieslowski's subsequent film The Double Life of Veronique, are a case at point. Another example would be Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express. Unlike Four Nights with Anna, these movies either portrait the stalker as victim (Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery), welcomed mysterious seducer (The Double Life of Veronique), or raise the possibility of a happy end (Chungking Express). Nothing could be further away from reality.
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