director Magdalena Łazarkiewicz
screenplay (based on the play of the same name by Tadeusz Różewicz) Magdalena Łazarkiewicz, Jan Różewicz
director of photography Zbigniew Wichłacz
music Jan A. P. Kaczmarek
with Jolanta Fraszyńska, Agata Piotrowska, Teresa Budzisz- Krzyżanowska, Jan Englert, Magdalena Zawadzka, Henryk Bista
awards
Warsaw Marmaid (Syrenka Warszawska), Film Critics Club SDP Award, 1992
[MONOLOGUE FROM THE FILM]
Men don’t differ much from animals. They’ve made butterflies of us, but how can such a stallion fertilize a butterfly? We are ashamed of our own body, and they keep running around with those stinkhorns of theirs out in the open. I swore by the ashes of our mutual mother that one day I’d let out a fart like a farmhand in the middle of a parlour. And then I could die or go to a nunnery. But let them see that I’m a human being just like them.
ELŻBIETA ZANIEWICZ, WOMEN ARE HUMANS, TOO [KOBIETA TEŻ CZŁOWIEK], ‘TWÓRCZOŚĆ’, 1993, NO. 7
Magdalena Łazarkiewicz’s film is a faithful screen version of Tadeusz Różewicz’s play which, as we remember, had to cover a long and peculiarly difficult road to reach the public (…). Contrary to appearances, ‘White Marriage’ is not a drama about the erotic anxieties of a girl’s bedroom, but a sneering and provocative reckoning, in the form of a Young Poland modernist pastiche, with the stereotypes of morals and culture (…) Bianka’s panicky fear of erotica is but her existential fear, fear of the centuries – old tradition of a woman fulfilling the role of ‘the wife always pregnant’ and Patriotic Polish Mother.
history periods
