HAPPY MAN

Malgorzata Szumowska’s first full-length feature is a portrait of Jan, an author yet to be published. He still lives with his mother. Just when he decides it’s time to change his life, he learns his mother is terminally ill. He resolves to become the son he hasn’t been up to that point – but nothing goes to plan. The director frames the depressive reality of her protagonist within the flaking frames of windows and doors, ghostly hospital corridors, desolate stairwells. The gloomy, subdued photography gradually turns the character study into a metaphor for Poland’s embracing of capitalism: the character of society as a whole is determined by egotism, moral decay, and inefficiency.