A YEAR OF THE QUIET SUN / ROK SPOKOJNEGO SLONCA

A Year of the Quiet Sun is seemingly substantially different from Krzysztof Zanussi’s other films. The first reason for this is that the action does not take place in the present but in the past – in 1946. Secondly, the plot revolves around a romance between Emilia (Maja Komorowska), a Pole who returns with her mother (Hanna Skarżanka) to their homeland shortly after the war, and Norman (Scott Wilson), an American soldier serving on the Recovered Territories. However, the storyline about love born on the post-war ashes is far from melodramatic. The main protagonists are all more than forty years old, mature and harshly treated by fate. Emilia lost her husband during the war and does not expect much from life; she is tired and has lost all her life delusions. Norman, a former inmate of a German prison camp, tries to work out his traumatic experience of war in the destroyed Europe and is not in a hurry to go to America. He does not speak Polish and she does not speak English, but their similar experience allows them to communicate without words. The relationship between the lovers is not a passionate desire, but a need for closeness and warmth, whereas their love is from the very beginning marked by knowledge of death.
Robert Birkholc