A visitor to Sodankylä in 1988, Krzysztof Zanussi’s crisis analysis, broadcast on Finnish television under the title “Välitilinpäätös” (Interim Report), continues this year’s programme’s shadow theme of unstable relationships. Middle-aged, impulsive and open-minded accountant Marta (Maja Komorowska) languishes in the limbo of a marriage grown stale. Her distant, colourless and dry, albeit faithfully safe and dependable husband Jan (Pjotr Fronczewski) is unable to make his wife happy, and a new man entering her life – university teacher Jacek (Marek Piwowski) – presents her with a difficult choice: whether to respect her responsibilities and obligations or to break away once and for all, gaining personal freedom and shattering the prevailing balance.
Zanussi performs an inventory of everyday life with his psychological microscope, in which the marital teapot is allowed to scream like a factory whistle. The director’s characteristic “depiction of the search for clarity and serenity” – in the words of Markku Tuuli – turns into a moral study, with safe conformity on one side of the scales and turbulent passion on the other. The most essential question is related to how green the seemingly lusher grass waiting on the other side of the fence really is. A parallel to this surgically precise vivisection of a life wasted could be Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman, completed two years later.
Lauri Timonen