A Woman on Her Own

One of the 'missing ten' films which ran into censorship trouble in Poland, not so much a cry from the heart as a hectoring scream of miserabilism. Agnieszka Holland traces the life, and love affair with an epileptic, club-footed no-hoper, of a prematurely-aged postwoman struggling to bring up her son. She lives in a rented cesspit of a one-bed flat by the railway tracks (the recurrent metaphorical image is of trains passing her by), sans TV set but replete with banging pans, totally unsympathetic landlord, and a chip the size of the Polish national debt. She faints from overwork in scene three, is made homeless in scene 17, then things start getting really bad. The three lead actors show considerable ability, but collapse, like the audience, under the farcical catalogue of woe they are required to endure.