The contradictions of a public-intellectual action flick
This year’s Nobel Prize committee revealed its political agenda by giving a literature award on October 8 to controversial gender activist and poet Anne Carson. One day later, the English-language Polish movie Winter of the Crow opened, giving the general public an adaptation of a short story by 2019 Nobel Prize–winner Olga Tokarczuk.
Winter of the Crow starts with a literary and cinematic hoax: gender-swapping Tokarczuk’s 1998 tale “Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw” to make its protagonist female. British scholar Dr. Joan Andrews (Lesley Manville) travels to Poland in 1981 during its political winter (literally, a blizzard), precisely when martial law is declared and the communist country faces its Solidarity workers’ revolution.
Polish director Kasia Adamik, making her feature-film debut, plays an Anne Carson–worthy trick by making Joan Andrews an imperious, idealized figure; she’s a quintessential academic, probably lesbian, who commands the attention of elite Western intellectuals (evoking Susan Sontag’s travel to Bosnia in the 1990s). Approached by leering bureaucrat Beata (Sascha Ley), then intrigued by student revolutionary Alina (Zofia Wichlacz), Andrews personifies the mythic public intellectual — caught up in egotism while also seduced by the celebrity that feeds her sense of entitlement. Her academic career permits a high-handed attitude toward international affairs. “What a fussy hag, totally different than her books,” Alina opines.
During her lecture, Andrews is interrupted by a protester, costumed in a straitjacket, who hijacks her audience’s attention, insisting on the urgent necessity of revolution. From there, Andrews’s intellectual isolation morphs into violent, convoluted Jason Bourne–style espionage.
Adamik trickily synthesizes the spy-movie formula with both Tokarczuk and Carson influences, first reflecting Tokarczuk’s reputation as a writer, activist, and clinical psychologist: Andrews is the author of the widely admired tome The Unknown Territory: Dreams, which puts her in Carson mode. When asked, “Do you know what is going to destroy the communism?,” Andrews snaps “Capitalism.” But she is corrected: “No. Imagination.” Adamik plunges her in a nightmare that’s part Franz Kafka, part Carl Jung: distorted overhead angles of anonymous buildings and empty streets — an oppressive atmosphere similar to Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.
This presumably justifies Adamik’s repeated symbolic use of black crows (a reference to the Polish word “wrona,” describing its treacherous junta) that recur in Andrews’s dreams. She also sees the world as a battle among schizophrenics and takes pictures with a Polaroid camera “to be able to produce an objective account of reality in almost real time.” Yet it’s Adamik who leans into obvious myth and symbolism: The film imitates Krzysztof Kieślowski’s cynical critique of political cinema in Camera Buff, and an Apocalypse Now poster hangs in the distance.
Because there are so few films about public intellectuals, the thriller aspects of Winter of the Crow are distracting — further distancing us from obscure figures like Carson and Tokarczuk, neglecting the fact of their political futility. When Andrews dispatches an intruder with lethal speed, Adamik’s intellectual affectation gives way to ridiculous, unconvincing chase-movie routines — Andrews the fussy hag as assassin.
Manville, always so deeply moving in Mike Leigh’s films, is straitjacketed by this Carson-Tokarczuk affectation. She plays Adamik’s Carson-Tokarczuk conceit professionally, not convincingly. Feminist intellectual mystique is replaced by yet another example of liberal self-righteous romanticism.
It’s ironic when Alina warns Andrews that the Communist Crows “want us to be helpless and scared” because “such people are easy to manipulate and control.” Winter of the Crow offers a fantasy for those film-culture gatekeepers who’d never acknowledge the West’s recent Covid-era close call with fascism. This pseudo-intellectual, self-aggrandizing, Nobel prize–related fare is silly and self-serious — a New Yorker magazine version of Marvel trash. Intellectual hoaxes may dominate the literary world. Thankfully, there are few such movies.