Anything Can Happen, made in 1995, continues in this
intimate vein. Here Łoziński’s six-year-old son Tomasz approaches elderly strangers in a park in Warsaw. As in 89mm from Europe, the young protagonist serves as a winsome stand-in for the filmmaker, gaining the strang- ers’ trust before he tests on them his child’s blunt logic. The existence of dinosaurs, of God, the importance of love and of integrity are whimsically debated. The tone darkens slowly, as Łoziński cunningly lets us in on the speakers’ conservative viewpoints. From obsolete social mores to theories akin to modern-day creationism, this is a witty, polemical vision of maturity that also encapsu- lates history (two world wars, communism). Anything Can Happen is the one film in Łoziński’s oeuvre about which the renowned Polish film critic Tadeusz Lubelski wrote that had it not been for its masterful cinematography, we could mistake it for a candid family picture. Indeed, it could be called, “Life, death, and everything in between,” as Łoziński’s hidden camera creates a seemingly unmedi- ated, often comic effect. Out of reach, the conversations flow unrestrictedly. With imagery of verdant foliage and strutting peacocks, Anything Can Happen keeps its pal- ette lithe yet is haunted by memory and death. More than once, Łoziński has been inspired by
newspaper reports. In Front Collision and How to Live, he investigates the reported situations to ferret out and complicate the facts. In So It Doesn’t Hurt, he intervenes to undo the damage of overdetermined reporting. Here Łoziński transitions away from a sardonic, counterpunch- ing approach to a more introspective one. But to appreci- ate this, we must first consider the film’s prequel, The Visit. Sometime around 1974, Łoziński saw on television how a brash journalist manipulated reclusive farmer Urszula Flis, whose trade belied her intellectual aspirations. He decided to turn the confrontation into a psychodrama. He visited Urszula with another journalist. Questioned
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about her solitary lifestyle and obstinacy, Urszula pas- sionately pushed back against the single-minded image that the media had created of her as a class hero. She also challenged the young reporter’s feminism that cast her as atavistic or quaint. The Visit is a skin-crawling film, for its tabloid sensationalism is done in the name of hard- edged truth. A reenactment rooted in facts, it occupies the neither/nor middle ground that Łoziński calls his “golden mean.” In the sequel, Łoziński pushes the question of report- ing ethics further. In 1998, twenty-four years later, he revisits Urszula with Jacek Petrycki, his longtime camera- man (who also shot The Visit), and a different interviewer. Łoziński opens the new film with a segment from The Visit. And so, from the start, So It Doesn’t Hurt is dialectical, its second part riffing on and arguing with the first. The conversations in So It Doesn’t Hurt take on a more languid pace; silences replace the barrage of questions from The Visit, yet they amplify rather than diminish the intensity of the exchange. Łoziński burrows into painful, intimate details from Urszula’s past but now in the spirit of greater give-and-take: the two women, an interviewer and her subject, cement their partnership with mutual empathy. By stripping the previous film’s confident veneer—news as oracle, investigation as pure objectivity—Łoziński opens up the playing field. But he also plants questions about the unknowability and the inherent mystery of any human subject. Łoziński is famously not fond of cinéma verité, but
it is hard not to see in So It Doesn’t Hurt a psychoana- lytic impulse similar to the more affecting parts of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer. The camera holds Urszula in extended close-ups, resist- ing the urge to cut when apparently nothing is hap- pening. This “nothing” is ultimately Łoziński’s greatest gamble, but his willingness to hold the frame pays off
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