Starring: Andrzej Seweryn, Dawid Ogrodnik, Aleksandra Konieczna
Directed by: Jan P. Matuszynski
Rating: ★★★★☆
Zdzisław Beksiński’s oeuvre has been rediscovered after his tragic death one decade ago. It’s not that his visionary style was not appreciated in Poland and abroad, but his figure has been devalued among local academic specialists, mainly because of the tacky morbidity of his works and lack of artistic education.
2016, though, will be certainly remembered as a key year in his posthumous success. Recently, the Nowa Huta Cultural Center opened a permanent exhibition of his works belonging to the Dmochowski family. Additionally, Jan P. Matuszyński released a double-headed biopic about the artist himself (Andrzej Seweryn) and his son Tomasz (Dawid Ogrodnik), a famous translator and radio journalist that committed suicide.
Matuszyński opted for moving the scenes of the artist at work to the background while focusing on the Beksińskis’ family relationships. Ostatnia rodzina (The Last Family) proves that synth pop hits on vinyl from the Western Bloc and Coca-Cola bottles could sometimes also reach Poland in the Communist era.
Above all, The Last Family is a thorny and intimate film about death working in front of the camera, as filmed by the artist himself while experiencing losses in his family. Matuszyński managed successfully to avoid any melodramatic tone in his film. Seweryn’s brilliant rendition of Beksiński unveils the visual sadism and voyeuristic penchants that affected the artist during his lifetime. From this perspective, his character can be compared to the one of Filip Mosz in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Camera Buff (1977) who is also willing to film amateurishly everything in his private life. At the same time, Ogrodnik’s terrific method acting as the mentally unstable son of the artist is worth the price of admission by itself. Nobody turned their nose up this year in Gdynia when Matuszyński’s first feature film was given a Golden Lion.
Originally published by The Krakow Post on December 06, 2016