BALANCE, THE (BILANS KWARTALNG) (director/writer: Krzysztof Zanussi; cast: Maja Komorowska (Marta), Marek Piwowski (Jacek), Halina Mikolajska (Jan), Mariusz Dmochowski (Director), 1975-Poland)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Marta (Maja) is a do-gooder. She sees a boy crying while she is in a rush to go to work, and still stops to help him with the problem he is having with his teacher. This is the same teacher her son has. So she ends up meddling, telling the teacher what to do, which causes the teacher to take it out on her son and fail him. She works as an accountant in an office and is also the union representative, where she gets a chance to help her friend and confidante out, who is accused of stealing. She still insists on helping her friend even though her friend talks to her boss about her behind her back, which the boss tells her about. All she can say is, that she needs my help because she is weak.
By chance, she gets a lift to work by a former acquaintance, someone she hardly remembers, a handsome trainer, Jacek (Marek Piwowski). An attraction develops between the middle-aged woman and the athletic and free spirited Jacek, who tempts her with his casual air and sophistication that comes from traveling the world; but, she can't decide whether to leave her husband Jan (Halina), or to stay with Jan and try to make the marriage work for the stability of the family, even if the marriage has lost a lot of its romance.What makes her decision difficult is that she can't cheat on her husband without feeling guilty, so she says that her choice will have to be to leave him or stay with him as a faithful married wife.What also makes her decision difficult, is that Jan is such a decent guy, who does nothing wrong, he does not even try to tell her what to do when he picks up on what is going on.
Marta gets to know herself and what other people think of her, as she agonizes over her decision. She learns that others think her do-gooder nature causes more harm to others than good, that if she can't help in a positive way she should step aside and let the other person fend for themselves; that she does this because she is a self-indulgent person.
By putting herself through an emotional ringer, Marta does find out about what she is really made of, and what her marriage means to her. She is strengthened by the experience in a way that she has never felt before.
The acting was convincing, but the story didn't have enough suspense in it to sustain interest, especially when the ending was becoming increasingly predictable, as the story wore on. What interested me in a rather oblique way, was how tired life in Poland seemed, and how the real enemy seemed to be the bureaucratic nature of the country, that was off-handedly touched upon in the scenes at work, as the love triangle waned in my interest. I thought of how different things were in America during that time frame of the '70s, and how similar bureaucracies seem to be wherever they exist, whatever the time frame is.
REVIEWED ON 4/28/99 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
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