CODE BLUE. Strange horror indeed
I left just after the credits, although the meeting with the director Urszula Antoniak seemed interesting. I left with a sense of disappointment and bitterness, I left with a feeling that I watched a bad movie, which, however, I understand very well, which probably does not speak well either of me or of the director.
But Code Blue, stubbornly, remained somewhere in the back of my mind, festering like the best festival discoveries and shamelessly acquiring meanings. I no longer consider it a bad film. Perhaps because certain mannerisms that bothered me during the screening evaporated from memory. Or perhaps because some films are liked over time – although it’s rather difficult to “like” Antoniak’s cinema. Even with Nothing Personal it wasn’t easy for me: first admiration for the acting (the wonderful Stephen Rea and the discovery of the phenomenal, Locarno-awarded Lotte Verbeek; in Code Blue the screen is dominated by theater actress Blen de Moor), certain complaints about the form.
Then enlightenment, excitement: after all, this pace is perfect, the shots fantastic. The screen began to smell. Both films, Nothing Personal and Code Blue, are very bodily: not everyone can film nudity, Antoniak seems to have it in her blood. But there are also: moist earth, wonderfully squelching under the spade (you can almost smell it), a garden, chives, onion, grass, and the air after rain, when Martin and Ty return at dawn from the pub. In Code Blue we have a hospital, which also smells, or rather stinks; we have the protagonist’s apartment, which in no way resembles Martin’s cozy solitude. An atrocious estate of hideous blocks. A lot of thinking about space, anchoring characters in places that despite their highly symbolic function remain very concrete, physical, tangible.
I compare because these two films are still talking to each other in my head. Code Blue sheds new light on Nothing Personal. They’re different films – but still related. (I think this is called “an author’s style”). Urszula Antoniak tells the festival newspaper: her character was born out of a discovery I made in my private life. There is no greater intimacy than with a person who is dying. If you assist someone who is heading towards death, then between you develops an intimacy completely incomparable with anything else in life. I thought: what if there appeared a person who only wants such intimacy? These words refer to Marian, the nurse from Code Blue, but the issue of specific closeness to the dying person is rather a commentary on Nothing Personal for me. I had doubts about death in this film; I had the impression that it steals a certain universality. In the broader context – the context of Code Blue – I no longer have such an impression. Of course, the heroines of the two films differ here: one asks for nothing, the other sometimes seems like death incarnate (!).
The brutality of the film is undeniable – if someone still leaves the room because of euthanasia, because of rape, because it’s hard to watch, isn’t that good? It means that something still affects us. I don’t leave, I’ve seen a lot of violent images, but the film is frightening. It frightens precisely with this “uninvited intimacy” (borrowing Mrs. Antoniak’s words again). In both films, loneliness can be read as a choice, an attempt to control one’s own life. And, of course, it doesn’t work, it cracks, it cracks under the pressure of meeting another person. In Nothing Personal the result is a love story, a love story (I don’t know how else to put it, relationships are unequivocally romantic-erotic, they’ve appropriated this concept, and I mean love in a broader sense, without erasing, of course, from the Martin-Ty relationship a certain physicality; oh, the language stumbles…). In Code Blue – and here I might stop, because I think I’m revealing too much – in Code Blue it might be quite similar or completely the opposite, depending on the interpretation. I haven’t decided yet myself; there is such an ugly concept as a “multi-purpose film”, a film for multiple viewings, and since Nothing Personal turned out to be such a film, Code Blue will probably be too.
In hindsight, I see Code Blue as one of my best screenings. In an interview (conducted incidentally by Darek Kuzma, who years ago at the Warsaw Film Festival drew my attention to Nothing Personal…) Antoniak describes her debut as made from the heart, whereas Code Blue – from the guts. So I’m very glad that I felt unwell and nauseous because that’s how it should be; the genesis of discomfort ceases to matter, only the state matters. Cinema is not an escape from reality. Cinema is reality.
Words by Klara Kukowska
EDITORIAL team