Four Nights with Anna

A lonely man who works at a crematorium watches Anna, a nurse in the building opposite. Then watching stops being enough: he drugs her, enters her room at night, sits there doing nothing, sews on a button, winds her clock, and leaves in the morning. The film is not interested in perversion. It is interested in the end point of an inability to communicate: he does not want to harm her, he simply cannot manage being near her. The film neither forgives him nor turns him into a monster; it shows how he got here. The form is almost wordless. There is very little dialogue, the sound design comes forward, and time keeps jumping backwards. This is Jerzy Skolimowski's return. After the failure of Ferdydurke in 1991 he left filmmaking and spent seventeen years painting and writing poetry. This is both his first film after that gap and the first he shot in Poland from his own screenplay since Hands Up! was banned in 1967. It screened in Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2008, where the seventy-year-old Skolimowski told the assembled critics: to those who like me, I'm back. Artur Steranko and Kinga Preis star. Who it is for: viewers who like slow, uncomfortable character studies and Polish cinema. Who it is not for: anyone who needs to identify with the protagonist. The film keeps you beside a criminal and does not make it easy.