Director Andrzej Zulawski's adaptation of Manuela Gretkowska's controversial screenplay tells the story of an anthropology professor Michal's (Boguslaw Linda) who as the movie progresses develops two overwhelming obsessions. The first one is a mummified, 3,000 year-old, perfectly preserved body of a Shaman he and his colleagues have recently dragged out of a swamp, and the second – an enigmatic student (Iwona Petry) he meets by chance at Krakow Railway Station. In exactly a minute after they meet, they have passionate but joyless sex "The Last Tango in Paris" style. The girl whose name we'll never learn has been known as "The Italian" – she is not an Italian, she just used to work at the Italian Restaurant and make the best Pizza in town (or so she says). She emits some primitive, dangerous sexuality - she is unpredictable, swift and reckless. Very soon she and the professor are engaged in the affair that grows dark and explicit, and the movie enters "In The Realm of Senses" territory which prepares you for a very predictable and (if you ask me) ridiculous ending. Between plentiful (and boring) erotic scenes, including the butter-scene from the above mentioned Last Tango in Paris but with no butter, Michal tries to solve the mystery of the Shaman (remember, it is his first obsession?) There is one absolutely comical scene with Michal and his colleagues chanting and dancing around an indifferent mummy. There are also some young men running the streets of Krakow, screaming and firing the guns (I believe that it is supposed to represent the director's comments and criticism of the Polish Politics – but he lost me there). By the end of the movie Michal realizes that he must run from "The Italian" because (as he correctly guessed) "she is death" but the sexually voracious and violently disturbed girl has another plans for him...
I don't know what to think about this movie – is it an underrated breathtaking masterpiece of brutality, explicit sex, and passion that know no boundaries and no mercy or just a most pretentious, ridiculous, badly edited, and absolutely not original piece of cinematic garbage I've ever seen? The more I think of the fact that I had been smiling, laughing, and giggling through the entire movie (and I don't think that it was an expected reaction on this horror/occult/adult drama) the more it makes me lean to latter. Perhaps, if I'd never heard of or seen "The Last Tango in Paris", "In the Realm of Senses", "The Piano Teacher", I would've been in awe but I've seen them all and "Chamanka" did not tell me anything new about obsessive-possessive love-passion-hate that inevitably leads to self-destruction and death. Oh, no, wait, the creators of the movie threw in some nice and spicy elements as irrationality, necrophilia, mysticism, and (wow!) cannibalism but the dinner served a-la Dr. Lecter did not shock me; on the contrary I found it laughable.
I know that Zhulavski had been in trouble with the authorities in Poland during the Communist era and the obvious assaults on conventional morality, Catholicism, and Polish censorship – can be clearly seen in his film but that did not make it more interesting for me, either.
I don't know what to think about this movie – is it an underrated breathtaking masterpiece of brutality, explicit sex, and passion that know no boundaries and no mercy or just a most pretentious, ridiculous, badly edited, and absolutely not original piece of cinematic garbage I've ever seen? The more I think of the fact that I had been smiling, laughing, and giggling through the entire movie (and I don't think that it was an expected reaction on this horror/occult/adult drama) the more it makes me lean to latter. Perhaps, if I'd never heard of or seen "The Last Tango in Paris", "In the Realm of Senses", "The Piano Teacher", I would've been in awe but I've seen them all and "Chamanka" did not tell me anything new about obsessive-possessive love-passion-hate that inevitably leads to self-destruction and death. Oh, no, wait, the creators of the movie threw in some nice and spicy elements as irrationality, necrophilia, mysticism, and (wow!) cannibalism but the dinner served a-la Dr. Lecter did not shock me; on the contrary I found it laughable.
I know that Zhulavski had been in trouble with the authorities in Poland during the Communist era and the obvious assaults on conventional morality, Catholicism, and Polish censorship – can be clearly seen in his film but that did not make it more interesting for me, either.