All states of adolescence – Polish Film Festival

Two months turn out to be much more than a dull wandering in colourful trainers. It is a struggle between sudden emotions and a confrontation with the previously hidden ones. It is a fight to keep just a bit of agency on this rushing merry-go-round.

Although accompanied by more experienced actors - Roma Gąsiorowska and Jacek Borcuch, young faces storm the foreground, stealing viewer’s full attention. They are the pulse of this seemingly simple story. And they do that with boldness characteristic to beginners.

Julia Totoszko carries Nina inside her, as if she had known her since her childhood, not since the casting - each of her looks is both the attack and the defence, her silence, the moments when she presses her lips onto colourful vapes, weights as much as the most complicated monologue, and she herself, not the script, decides when the wave is going to hit and when to back out. She energises the screen adding pizzazz, speed, and maybe even more of the depth and character planned for this story to the whole plot of Liquid States.

Next to her, Wiktoria Węglowska as Miki, flows in a different stream - quieter, deeper, less showy, sometimes left unspoken but played with a great precision in this captivating minimalism.

Jan Sałasiński as Kamil adds to this mix something that could not be directed - a dialogue sounding as if no one has written it but heard it somewhere between the reeds under a masurian pier. And this supporting actor is perhaps the only ‘safe shore’ of this flowing story.

In their duet with Totoszko, the most aesthetically pleasing magic happens - they talk in such an alluring, yet natural way that they somehow escape from the overblown depiction of the youth in Polish films.

This whole Nina – Kamil scheme, this chemistry, thickened with unspoken words and sticky from the sweat, where every word is a tiny bit too short and a look a tiny bit too long, strangely begins to rhyme with what is happening between the father and the daughter. These two relationships cut the film with the exactly same, plucked rhythm - one fuels the other, repeatedly, in this psychopathic cycle. To the point where a person just wishes to get off that train but the doors are closed. The sparks flying here and there outline Nina’s character. One wants to believe in her, see more than just an archetype, a set of behaviour identical to search results in Google for a term ‘teenage rebel’.

Adults in the coming-of-age genre are still, like an anchor thrown somewhere deep in the frame, to know where the teenage storm came from at all. They both drift like buoys, somewhere in the background of this flood but even their experience does not allow them to fully immerse in their roles, even though they are sea dogs.

It may seem as if every film about adolescence uses the very same pool of frames and that Polish initiation cinema cannot escape this trend - a lake, Masuria, shaky planks of the pier and a dance in a fully-grown grass at the end of August.

One can complain that it looks like a visual maneuver from a festival elegance coursebook, however, when you take a look at this masurian setting by Miłosz Kasiura, with its odd, slightly nostalgic light, it is hard not to give in to this mood. It is a cinema, which very much wishes to be tactile, which tries to enclose a summer afternoon with its whole, burning hot baggage, even if it sometimes loses breath of the plot on its way.

And then, when the lights turn on and we go out to face that fresh, early Autumn air, we feel surprisingly warm inside. The film is honest in the way it is produced, has a sensitive, unintrusive look and the actors and actresses just shine. It was worth waiting for the moment when this uneasy, debutante wave would cast it ashore, on our festival shore in Gdynia.