Official Selection: International screening - review - LASTING (Nieulotne) by Jacek Borcuch

Love is a sun soaked drug in Borcuch’s tale of summertime romance gone sour in dreamy luminous Spain. Michal and Karina are two young and beautiful youths who seem made for each other. But as often happens, a tragic demise looms over them and mysterious secrecy opens up a distance between them that splits them up – seemingly irreversibly. End of act one. In act two, Michal desperately attempts a reconciliation that seems unlikely. 

Yet romanticism drives Borcuch’s story in the spiritual charge of rebellious themes flicks like Bonnie and Clyde and True Romance. In other words, despite the mayhem and murder, Michal and Karina are melodramatically destined to be together to the point where anything else that happens to them and leads to their break-up or subsequent attempts at a make-up are side stories. 

The process may seem frustrating to many – why should Michal forget about his murder and not be haunted by it as much as his break up? Easy, all in the name of portraying love as an addiction, a portrayal that thankfully a lot of the audience will be able to identify with. Because it’s clear that there is a lot of tenderness and poetry at the heart of Lasting. 

This is visually strengthened by an approach that reveals it in dreamlike and poetic motion, urging the audience to immerse in the physical environment and the emotional predicaments much like Malick, always more relevant in today’s cinematic landscape, does in his films. This complete contrast and paradoxical portrayal of relationship is seemingly distant from sensical, yet in turn itself paradoxically realistic both in pace and plot developments. 

Whilst Burcuch should answer to a stubborn forgetfulness and loss of perception of conventional audience tastes and modern cinematic trends, if not complete carelessness for it, there is no doubt about his noble intentions in preaching old fashioned idealisms of romanticism within a modern context. Lastng is a story driven by passionate feelings of innocence, the threat of human vulnerabilities and the revelation a needless lenience towards psychological self-destruction.