There’s a scene in Agnieszka Smoczynska’s second feature film, Fugue, where the husband of amnesiac protagonist, Alicja (screenwriter Gabriela Muskała), shows her a video of her breastfeeding her infant son. Krzysztof (Łukasz Simlat) watches Alicja closely: he’s looking for a reaction, anything to show him that a shred of his wife is left in this spiky-haired stranger. But he doesn’t get anything. Alicja watches an old, strange version of herself – Kinga, with her long blonde hair – breastfeed her son and the same blank, slightly distasteful stare with which she’s greeted her newfound family remains on her face. Amnesiac dramas are common, but Smoczynska manages to escape the cliches by making a complex and hostile film that remorselessly interrogates our assumptions about motherhood.
The story goes like this: a blonde woman stumbles along metro lines and along a dark tunnel, before hoisting herself up onto a busy platform, squatting in her stiletto shoes and urinating. Her clothes are dirty; her hair messy. Next there’s a cut to two years later and Alicja is in an institution, unable to remember anything. In an effort to uncover any information, the bizzare decision is made to put her on television. A cold studio scene follows in which Alicja, already uncompromising, says very little. But the audience are saved from disappointment by a tearful caller, who reveals that Alicja is actually his missing daughter, Kinga Slowik (and the initials of this name match the accidental signature the efforts of the doctors have dragged out of her). Alicja is then escorted by her psychiatrist back ‘home’ and left at the mercy of these strangers. Fugue makes no attempt to fetishise Alicja as an amnesiac: her lack of memories is not presented as a vulnerability and there’s none of slow reclamation associated with the genre. Her husband, if anything, regards her with the same cold suspicion with which she looks at him – “Why didn’t you look for me?” – and the other members of her family are awkward and hapless. Her son, Daniel (Iwo Rajski), runs away from her and puts drawing pins in her bed.
It’s this absence of familial love that is so interesting. Where another director might have presented Alicja as vulnerable and grateful for the opportunity to discover a family, Smoczynska explores a situation in which these bonds have dissolved entirely on one side without even a guilty residue. Alicja continues to introduce herself as Alicja and initially makes no effort to reconnect with either her son or her husband, telling Krzysztof quite frankly that she’s only staying with them until her identity card is ready (which, following the delivery of the paperwork by her father, will take three weeks) and is undisturbed by the insinuation that he’s replaced her with her old best friend, Ewa, who Daniel calls “mother”. Fugue is shot in blues and dull browns, and a weak grey light washes over everything, denying their home any homeliness and giving the film a cold, clinical feel that is reminiscent of Krzysztof Zanussi’s visual syntax (a scene in which Alicja visits Krzysztof at work, where he’s suspended above the huge metal skeleton of a boat is particularly stunning.) And although later she does become interested in her son and husband, and something that borders on reunion does take place, it’s clear that Alicja can never slip back into Kinga, whoever she was.
The word ‘fugue’ has several definitions. It’s a state in which one’s memory or identity is lost, associated with hysteria, epilepsy and nervous breakdowns. And then a fugue is a contrapuntal composition in which the subject, a melody or musical phrase, is introduced in one part and then taken up and developed by the other, the two voices interweaving, pushing the original theme to the limits of its sense. Smoczynska’s Fugue operates in a similar way: we discover things about Alicja through other characters, who comment upon and develop her identity, connecting her, when she finally allows it, with the past – but the original subject, the theme on which everything else depends, is stubborn. A fugue-state often includes a flight from one’s ordinary environments – the etymology of the word comes from the Latin fuga, ‘flight’ – which bleeds into the Italian ‘fugere’, ‘to flee’ – and Alicja is fleeing, freeing herself from her former life. Her clothes and short hair are closer to an anarchist teenager’s than the blonde, bourgeois Kinga; she swears, is crude, and wanders around totally naked. A scene in which she eats two cream pies at the same time, licking them up messily in front of her perturbed elderly father is gratuitously ugly. Her refusal to be what they expect is refreshing and in the film’s second half Alicja approaches the riddle of her former life with a detective’s professional mistrust – “What went wrong between us?”
Fugue is very different from Smoczynska’s 2016 hit, The Lure, with its man-eating mermaids and musical numbers. It’s a more straightforward film with a more conventional subject. But this is an assured and gripping work, animated by the same intense visual poetry of her earlier film, addressing a familiar thing – the permanent crisis of the family – via a host of unfamiliar, new ideas, guided by an incredible central performance from Muskała.
