“Torrents of Spring,” a romantic drama directed by the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, from 1989 (which I discuss in this clip), is adapted from a short 1872 novel by the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who, like Skolimowski, chose to live outside his native land. Turgenev, who lived mainly in France and in Germany, told the tale of a Russian nobleman on a stopover in Mainz. Skolimowski, who left Poland in the late sixties (he had already directed films there and in Belgium), has had an itinerant career. (Anthony Lane wrote in the magazine last year about “The Shout,” one of the many movies he made in Great Britain.)
The romance in “Torrents of Spring” is, among other things, a tale of the devastating lure of home. The Russian nobleman, torn between another immigrant (the tenderly romantic daughter of an Italian pastry chef) and a wildly capricious Russian aristocrat (whose surprising origins, as seen in this clip, add much to the story’s allegorical force), finds himself unable to form lasting bonds anywhere. The stopover that launches the story is the eternal condition of the foreigner, for whom life becomes merely a long series of stopovers. (The film’s final sequence is among the most striking and poignant depictions of nostalgia and regret that I’ve ever seen.) Skolimowski’s voluptuous, swoony, richly textured images of Western Europe, in which cultural confection and natural splendor combine in a heady swirl of painterly delight, bear a terrible ironic power: at his most devoted and most awestruck, he and his protagonist remain, in effect, tourists, permanent outsiders of the soul.
It was with great regret that I couldn’t be at the screening, on Dec. 20, at Film Society of Lincoln Center, of his new film, “Essential Killing,” which stars Vincent Gallo as a former Middle East fighter, held captive by American forces, who makes his escape through Eastern Europe. (He was present for a Q. & A. after the film, described at the Polish site The News.) We’re still awaiting the release of his prior film, “Four Nights with Anna,” from 2008. The state of international-film distribution has improved here in recent years; it’s still far from optimal.
