Miss Nobody

A diffident 15-year-old girl from the countryside moves with her family to a high-rise apartment in Warsaw. As she tries to adjust to city life, she's befriended first by a wild, gypsy-like classmate, and then by the teenage daughter of entrepreneurial Poles. Miss Nobody clearly stands for Poland-in-miniature, caught between eastern mysticism and western materialism, but as political allegory, this is crude and heavy-handed. Wajda, seemingly taking his cue from Kieslowski, concentrates on the emotional lives of his characters, rather than on the social changes occurring around them. The strongest scenes are those in which the elements themselves seem torn by the heroine's anxieties (a climactic scene in the woods); but Wajda is no miniaturist by nature, and one suspects he'd prefer a much more epic canvas than this. Adapted from a novel by Tomas Tryzna.