The Clowns

Rivalry, jealousy, loneliness, disappointment and betrayal are experiences that nearly every student must go through in order to grow. Gabriela Muskala’s feature debut The Clowns uses these subjects to create a compelling coming of age drama with a twist. Being a successful actress herself (Fugue, These Daughters of Mine, Courage), the Polish director gets the best out of her actors, giving them the chance to depict the turbulent reality of drama school in their first appearance on the big screen.

The story centres on students from a Faculty of Acting who are supposed to make a graduation film. They are very excited to learn that they will be working with Gajda (Oskar Hamerski), a director notoriously famous for his extreme acting methods, whose task introduces biblical and Polish romanticism characters into their mundane life. The students need to portray Cain, who kills his brother Abel out of jealousy because God preferred Abel’s sacrifice over his, and Balladyna, who murders her sister Alina after realising that she is going to be the one who marries a prince. As the young actors struggle to immerse themselves into their roles, these fictional characters become their alter-egos in real life.

Consumed by the theme of fratricide and sororicide, the students slowly begin to reveal their repressed desires, ambitions and insecurities, as their relationships crumble under the pressure of giving the most authentic performance. Their professional and private lives inevitably overlap and the results are a love triangle, broken friendship and an escalating fight. Illustrating such variety of emotions in 85 minutes is a challenging task, but the young actors handle it successfully.

Leading figures in the narrative are Łukasz, Olo (Cain and Abel), Julka and Alicja (Balladyina and Alina). Jan Łuć, portraying Łukasz, is focused and determined in his protagonist’s intentions, who struggles between becoming a great actor and resisting temptations. Sebastian Dela is powerful and convincing as Olo, who has a hard time hiding his jealousy of Łukasz’s talent and popularity. Justyna Litwic is very subtle yet effective in her performance as Julka – a timid aspiring actress with low self-esteem. Magdalena Dwurzyńska, meanwhile, is playful and conspicuous, just like her character Alicja, who provokes and seduces without hiding her ambitions.

The actors’ performance is emphasised with many close-ups meant to truthfully illustrate their emotional state when they are most vulnerable. At one point their reality fades into fiction, marked by saturated colors and disordered camera movements. The blur technique comes into effect in the scenes where the acting couples are rehearsing, in order to create confusion and make the audience doubt what is real and what is theatre. Some may not be keen on the theatrical elements, as they give a sense of watching a television play, nonetheless, they are cleverly added and may contribute to the idea that this is a film within a film about actors played by real actors.

It is true that The Clowns falls back on some naive notions, like “togetherness is the solution to all problems” or “anything is possible if you believe hard enough”, which may be dull for a more mature audience. However, it deals with topics familiar to every young person who is stepping into adulthood and may feel lost, insecure, anxious or trapped in the duality of human nature.