So bleak that it eventually feels like director Wojciech Has might be having a laugh, 1958’s Petla (Noose, or The Noose in English) is a desperate story of a terrible alcoholic trying to give up drink after the latest in a line of humiliations. It’s as if Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend had been rewritten by Samuel Beckett and then turned into a movie by Béla Tarr.
This was Has’s debut feature and it’s as much a career mission statement as story in itself. Between Petla and his farewell, 1988’s Niezwykla Podróz Baltazara Kobera, Has made films that were often bleak, surreal and characterised by the blurring of fantasy and reality, chief among them The Saragossa Manuscript and The Hour-Glass Sanatorium.
Petla is, relatively speaking, an easy ride, a straightforward narrative following Kuba (Gustaw Holoubek) through one day while he tries to stay off the booze. Early on there’s a scene with Kuba’s long-suffering girlfriend, Krystyna (Aleksandra Slaska), who he is trying to impress with this latest attempt to get on the wagon, but from here it’s a case of Kuba out alone in the world, trying to stay away from drink.
He’s sober, but thanks to a reputation for being a soak, everyone treats Kuba as if he’s drunk, to the point where he winds up in a police station after getting caught up in a tussle with a couple of guys who accuse him of barging into them because he’s soused. He isn’t. But he might soon be.
Kuba is a drinker because he finds life without the bottle to be unbearable. He’s the existential hero for whom boredom is the worst thing imaginable, and at a certain point in Petla a question starts to shimmer into focus: is Has painting a picture of the plight of the existential hero, driven to booze on account of the Sisyphean awfulness of life? Or is he critiquing these kind of outsider heroes of the era, originators of the “first world problem” attitude, who mope about in books by Camus and Sartre?
You won’t get any steers from Holoubek’s performance. He is absolutely straight as a die in his portrayal of this hangdog loner. Considering that for the most part Kuba only has two emotions – despair and self-pity – it is a beautifully shaded performance by Holoubek.
In Kuba’s encounters with a couple of other soaks we get a grim portrait of the mindset of the drinker in his cups – verbose, incoherent, self-absorbed – and Has matches that interior landscape with exteriors that are just as bleak. The houses in the town where Kuba lives are dilapidated, the streets are largely empty apart from the odd child, Kuba’s apartment is stark and lacking comfort.
It’s lit like a film noir, with harsh side lighting and Has and his DP Mieczyslaw Jahoda get up in the face of Holouba with wide lenses, distorting the perspective and adding an air of paranoia to everything.
The same thing is going on with the sound design. When Kuba gets a phone call early on the voice of the person at other end is loud and distorted. Everything in this movie jangles, reflecting Kuba’s frazzled nerves. It’ll all be OK once he’s had a drink.
Really, if you like this sort of thing, it is superb. In a relentlessly dark way. There is a matter-of-fact “it is what it is” aspect to the whole film. Here is Kuba. He’s trying not to drink. Can he manage it? If he can, how will he live in a world devoid of interest for him? Why, in short, is the movie called Noose? Why indeed.
Petla – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
