The immigrant experience. Be honest, your heart just sank a little. Possibly because you’ve seen a few movies about it and you imagine you know what you’re about to be served when you hear that Beyond Words (Pomiędzy słowami, in the original Polish) is just such a thing. The tale of a sweet and blameless brown person having a hard time in a mostly white country. But that’s not what Urszula Antoniak’s fourth film is about at all. Instead it asks a rarely asked question – what of the not-so-sweet, not-so-blameless white person in another largely white country?
Michael looks like a German but he isn’t one. He’s a Pole who immigrated to Berlin some time ago and now fancies himself as so at home in the city that he is, in effect, as German as his boss and old friend, Franz. Michael works as a lawyer and as well as dealing with fancy clients with big accounts, his firm does some pro bono work, representing immigrants. A bit of ESG-washing, a conscience salve, it’s good for the firm’s public image.
And that’s where Antoniak’s film opens, at a desk where the rangey blond Michael is sitting opposite a black would-be immigrant and having a tough time of it – the man will insist on his human dignity, and won’t concoct some fanciful story about being tortured or persecuted to help his case along. Silly man, Michael complains to Franz later. These immigrants, huh?
I have got ahead of myself, because up till now we have assumed Michael is as German as they come. Antoniak pulls the rug out from under Michael and us when Michael’s estranged father, Stanislaw, arrives on the scene, to reconnect with his son, so his story goes, and to act as the necessary goad for this film to work. Dad speaks no German, just Polish. When Michael introduces him to his boss, there’s a hint of a rictus on Franz’s face and it remains fixed there while the three of them have a lunch full of awkward moments. Having seen a few Antoniak films now, she does love her awkward moments.
Dad’s arrival has resurrected a part of his identity Michael would rather forget. How Polish is Michael and how German? He can still speak his native language but does identity start and end with language?
From here, sidestepping slightly, Antoniak gives us the story of Michael and Stanislaw, strangers edging about each other, establishing tentative connections. Michael the suited and booted professional gent; Stanislaw the unkempt drinker who bridles at being called an old hippie. “Punk,” dad corrects. “No future!” he sloganises proudly. The film takes flight here, as two grown men warily and gradually make a connection, in baby steps, eventually bonding properly at a lap-dancing club where, it turns out, both men have an eye for a sexy undressed woman. Tender emotion in the oddest corners being another thing Antoniak loves.
The acting here is fantastic, with Andrzej Chyra particularly good as the twinkly old rascal Stanislaw, while Jakub Gierszal wrestles with a near impossible role as Michael – that’s a hell of a lot of internal conflict Gierszal has somehow to get on screen.
It’s a tale of identity unpacked, of estrangement resolved. In case that’s not enough, Antoniak and DP Linnert Hillege shoot it all in a striking black and white, super contrasty here and there to emphasise that identities have to polarise when either/or questions are asked, but always at the luxe end of the scale.
Perhaps the gorgeous visuals and the emphasis on the father/son bond betray a nervousness. This is not a life-and-death tale about precarious immigration, more a case of Michael coming to terms with his identity. He has the luxury of doing with it largely what he wants to, when he’s decided what that is. First world problems, huh?
Beyond Words – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
