Pokot is an entry in a recent genre cycle of ‘eco-thrillers’ – and like the Icelandic film Woman at War (2018) it has a central female character. In this case the film is also directed by a woman, the now veteran Polish auteur Agnieszka Holland who has recently directed episodes of well-known American ‘long-form TV narratives’ such as House of Cards (2015-17) and earlier The Wire (2004-8). Actually the directorial role is shared by Agnieszka Holland and her daughter Kasia Adamik and the script is by Holland and Olga Tokarczuk, adapted by the latter from her own novel. Pokot is also, as the title implies, a form of North European genre based on the hunt and the machismo of its male followers. There is a further set of generic elements but I don’t want to spoil the narrative so I’ll put them to one side for the moment.
The central character is Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat), a woman in her sixties (IMDb calls her ‘elderly’ – harrumph!). She’s a mysterious character with a past who doesn’t like people using her personal name and is quick to correct pronunciation of her family name. I did wonder if this was an identity issue (i.e. a language/naming issue) as other characters stumble over it and repeatedly check it. Someone else at the screening suggested that this might be a hangover of the communist regime in Eastern Europe but I think it is significant that the narrative is located in a ‘contested’ region in South West Poland along the border with the Czech Republic. This is an area with National Parks on either side of the border. Designated a UNESCO ‘biosphere’ the area has plentiful wildlife, which moves across the borders. The local population is Polish but has also historically been part of German-Czech Bohemia.
The narrative covers the four seasons with a short coda. Each section of the narrative has a title card for the month of the year and a listing of all the wildlife that can legally be hunted during the month. Duszejko has a house on the edge of the forest. She has a couple of neighbours, one who treats animals very badly and another she will later come to know better. Her past is not spelt out but there is a suggestion that she has been an engineer and that she worked overseas, possibly on forms of aid work. Perhaps she was a form of hippy traveller? Now she has three interests. She teaches English part-time in the school in town, she explores astrology and she cares passionately about the wildlife in the region. This brings her into confrontations with the hunters, i.e. most of the older male population, and the police to whom she regularly reports the ‘murder’ of animals killed by the hunters and rails against the absurdity of a legal killing one day that is illegal the next (i.e. at the end of the designated monthly season).
This is a familiar thematic of an ‘odd’ character (in the context of local culture) and conventionally, the narrative then provides Duszejko with a small team of potential collaborators who will help her against the strength of the local hunting lobby. She meets a young IT specialist and his girlfriend, Boros (Miroslav Krobot) a Czech entomologist, and her neighbour ‘Matoga’ (Wiktor Zborowski) who also has a back story. Each of these individuals has something in their past which makes them an outsider in the region. The narrative is an eco-thriller on the basis of the struggle to protect the wildlife from the hunters. But perhaps it is more a question of the brutality of hunting and the extension of that brutality across the local culture? I was struck by the difference between hunting in the UK (influenced by social class and the ecological damage caused by maintaining large populations of game species impacting on other flora and fauna) and the more widespread hunting culture in the rest of Europe which is more ‘open’ but more pervasive. I’m thinking about films such as The Hunters (Sweden 1996) or The Hunt (Denmark 2012) both of which share some elements with Pokot. The hunting crowd in Pokot includes most of the men in the district and the ‘club-like’ feel of this fraternity also has links to science fiction/horror narratives like The Stepford Wives (1975/2004) in which the men in a community secretly replace their wives with simulacra/android robots.
But this film also draws on both crime fiction and fairy tales. An older woman who acts as a kind of animal detective investigating the murders of several hunters recalls Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, though the murders themselves might have taken place in the mythical world of Midsummer Murders. There is also a suggestion that the filmmakers have turned to Angela Carter and her ideas about traditional fairy tales – Little Red Riding Hood is referenced and, although I shouldn’t think it is intended, there seems to be a kind of reverse Wicker Man narrative in which the outsider, instead of being sacrificed, turns the tables on the local community of hunters.
I don’t want to spoil the narrative pleasure of the film, but I think most audiences will guess what has been happening re the murders. The coda offers what most of us would consider as a ‘happy ending’ though in the discussion which followed our screening some voices raised concerns about violent actions being condoned because the victims deserved to die. I’m interested in this resurgence of what I have termed the ‘eco-thriller’. Thinking about it, the eco-thriller is a much larger category than I have suggested, but in the past it has mostly been about large corporations threatening to damage the environment and it has linked in to the ‘technology gone wrong’ elements of science fiction or the ‘disaster’ narratives of climate change such as The Day After Tomorrow (US 2004). Pokot belongs to a more defined category in which ecology issues are presented in more subtle ways and lead to more individual actions. I suspect we will see more films like this. I also wonder if there is the suggestion of a new tendency in Polish cinema in which Poles who have been abroad and returned home bring a new perspective to life in modern Poland. I was reminded of my experience of watching The Birds Are Singing in Kigali (Poland 2017), a very different film dealing with PTSD suffered by a central character on her return from Rwanda.
Mainstream Polish films are getting released in the UK, targeting the large Polish diaspora community, but more art-orientated films are harder to find. Pokot is available on a Region 2 DVD. One last trivia point, Tomasz Kot, the star of Cold War (Poland 2018), which made £1 million at the UK box office, plays the town’s prosecutor in Pokot.
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