Collision Matters
The limits of the world that SUICIDE ROOM aims to investigate end up being the limits of the film itself - a review of the Berlinale Panorama entry by director Jan Komasa.
SUICIDE ROOM
Colliding worlds keep us from getting bored with life, and Jan Komasa – one of the directors of ODE TO JOY (ODA DO RADOSCI, 2005) and the director of the documentary SPLYW (2007) – succeeds in entertaining us with his new film, SUICIDE ROOM (SALA SAMOBÓJCÓW, Poland), which represents Polish cinema in the Panorama section. The film tells us the story of Dominic, a rich kid who goes to an expensive school, wears expensive clothes and attends expensive theatres (his family frequents the opera). That posh world is clearly described by Komasa from the opening scene, which introduces us to the main characters by alternating shots of their faces with shots of some performing actors on a stage (Dominic and his family are at the opera). That parallelism becomes a confrontation between the mise en scène of the play and the characters’ lives, and a further confrontation between theirs and ours. That introductory scene becomes a statement in which the director says this is a film about confronting worlds, about worlds and underworlds that exist in real life, in fiction, in virtual universes – in every one of us. And the idea of confrontation is constantly highlighted by the introduction of elements that show physical limits between those parallel worlds: Dominic’s hair covering part of his face; the sealed doors from his mother’s office; the boy’s impenetrable bedroom area; the virtual boundaries Dominic manages to break in a cybernetic world which keeps him company but, also, isolates him.
Everything is planned for this kid’s successful future when he realises that he is gay. His parents’ and friends’ disapproval lead him to a deep depression which in turn drives him to become an addict of a virtual community, a place where he finds companionship and support. That cybernetic world becomes a strong visual presence in the movie, but the scenes in which it appears are ugly and overlong. In spite of that, their videogame reality does become an effective tool with which Komasa gives flesh to the idea of artificiality, to the deep fakeness that is both Dominic’s refuge and isolated prison.
This whole movie is an ode to the tools we seize (denial, internet, books, music, pain, love) in order to transform a world we do not embrace. In short, in SUICIDE ROOM we find a boy who seeks the tools to build his world and a director who struggles to do the same.
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