02/02/2022 - Art imitates life in the Polish-Dutch filmmaker's latest feature, in which she turned to the ongoing pandemic for inspiration

(© Maciej Zienkiewicz)

What movies do audiences need right now? How to balance reflections on the real world and escapist entertainment? These are questions that have been floating around in the head of screenwriter and director Urszula Antoniak for quite some time. Her latest feature Splendid Isolation [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Urszula Antoniak
film profile], similarly to her 2011 film Code Blue [+see also:
trailer
film profile], deals with death and the processing of it. The minimalist film, shot on a shoestring budget, is inspired not only by Antoniak’s personal loss of a friend. It is also a reflection on how death has become ingrained heavily in our daily life since COVID-19. The movie had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Big Screen Competition. Antoniak spoke to Cineuropa via phone from Rotterdam.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Cineuropa: The festival had to be held online, but your movie would have been a fascinating theatrical experience with all its intense wide-screen shots and vast landscapes.
Urszula Antoniak: It is an experience. The music, the images and also the duration of the shots. Everything is more focused. The music was also very important to me. Together with Milenia Fiedler, my editor, we figured that the film needed a human voice. The key to this was opera. We’re using Baroque music. One of the songs uses a line that says “Let me breathe, let me breathe again.” So the lyrics make for an incredible context.

You were inspired by your personal experience with Corona. In the film, death is inevitable. How has your view on death and our proximity to it changed?
I brought in a connection with the death of my friend and the grief I felt for 12 years. But COVID-19 is different. When you watch movies by Antonioni for example, the characters have this existential ennui. Which is very nice for normal times. But with Corona, existential issues became part of our daily life. So I was thinking, what kind of films do people need now? They will always need entertainment. But there must also be films to react to what is going on around us. Therefore I applied a lyrical tone to death and our fragile human condition. Splendid Isolation was first meant to be a thriller with three people on an island, and then later became a full-blown allegory. Someone is dying, someone is taking care of the person and death comes between them.

The caretaker, Anna, seems to be very much in denial about what is happening to Hannah. Is she pushing death away from her too much to really enjoy their last moments together?
It’s the allegory of the whole process of dying and taking care of this person. It comes in stages. The first stage is denial. But there comes the moment when you cannot pretend anymore. It would be like bad theatre.

What kind of personification of Death were you striving for?
I had an idea that someone should come between these two women, and that it should be a man. And then I thought, why not go full-on on this whole allegory, like in The Seventh Seal? And then I thought, what kind of gender would Death be? Is it a female or a male? I found this incredible actress, Abke Haring. It's not so much that she has an androgynous look. The representation of Death is someone who is coming to literally take your breath away. But taking your breath away is almost like falling in love. It is erotic. My discovery about death, about dying, is very sensual and also very spiritual. But in the end, it is also very heartbreaking.