Three years ago when I spoke to Tomasz Wasilewski about his sophomore feature Floating Skyscrapers, the Polish director teased a future project which would be a portrait of the lives of four woman in the wake of the collapse of communism. That idea came to fruition as a story of lust, isolation and loneliness called United States of Love, and so Tomasz returns to the podcast to delve further into his rigorous approach to rehearsals and the new difficulty he found when it came to editing a story in which multiple interacting characters’ lives play out on screen sequentially but all share synchronous timelines.
United States of Love (Zjednoczone Stany Miłości) (2016)
Poland, 1990. The winds of change are blowing in Poland. The first euphoric year of freedom, but also of uncertainty for the future. Four apparently happy women of different ages decide it’s time to change their lives, fight for their happiness and fulfill their desires. Agata is a young mother, trapped in an unhappy marriage, who seeks refuge in another, impossible relationship. Renata is an older teacher fascinated with her neighbor Marzena – a lonely former local beauty queen, whose husband works in Germany. Marzena’s sister Iza is a headmistress in love with the father of one of her students.
It’s a film about four women but at the end it’s a film about one woman. That was very important for me to put one woman in the body of four.
