It begins with a bang, literally, and doesn't let up. 95 minutes of a masterful, funny, bloody mess of a movie. If I hadn't seen it in an art-house would I have enjoyed it as much? As it is, I saw Summer Love: The First Polish Western by Piotr Uklanski at SFMoMA and enjoyed it immensely. Every twisted turn, every Westernism, every bloody god-awful painful violent act and evocative stance.
What is evoked? Every great gritty Western to come before it, and then some.
If his Nazis, that collection of 166 film still portraits of actors as Nazis, exposes the "continuing allure of fascist aesthetics as the ultimate form of fetishized power," to quote Kate Bush (ArtForum 11/2002), then Summer Love lays out the continuing raunchy attraction of the downward spiral of the abjectly misplaced, degraded, forgotten. Sideswiped by the train of history, out of reach of collective order, individuals retreat into an inner chaos of raw emotions and brutal instincts. It's the ultimate breakdown of nameless people in a nameless town. And we've all been there.
Uklanski works here within the confines of the Western genre, using the standardized building blocks of this type of saga, yet this is a Polish Western and so it is clear other frontiers are being evoked as well. One of the more disturbing, in a film of disturbing scenes, is the degredation of The Woman, the only woman in this outpost run on conflicting masculine thrusts and parries. She is beaten, shamed, violently shorn by the genitally-wounded Big Man. Her bare, bloodied scalp looks mightily like the news photos of women likewise abused in The War. It is the Woman Taken In Adultery story (John 8:2-11) yet again. The veracity of these primal scenes underlies the Western varnish.
The man who set himself afire in a performance called Full Burn, works with shock and awe. Things get bloody and then bloodier in Summer Love. He works the image of violence—this in itself a reflection of the fact that most of the violence—torturous insanity—we respond to every day is mediated: the image of violence.
So what happens? Given the context of the man's work, the ironic, self-aware craft of the man's work, we laugh. I did. Out loud.
"In the end," he says, "what happens is that we end up looking at things with our mouths open, fascinated, regardless of what we watch, whether it's a Nazi flick or people on fire."
