United States of Love

Year: 2016

Actors: Magdalena Cielecka, Marta Nieradkiewicz

Duration: 106 min

In euphoric early 1990s post-Communist Poland, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, four women experience an utterly different reality, sinking deeper and deeper into despair. Agata, a young married mother, finds herself consumed by an unhappy marriage and an almost obsessive infatuation for an unreachable man, as the frigid school principal, Iza, battles with rejection. Meanwhile, Iza's sister, Marzena, a 1986 beauty pageant winner and, nowadays, an aerobic instructor, suffers from her husband's long absence. Likewise, Renata, a reclusive middle-aged language teacher, finds solace in her singing birds and a silent longing for the unattainable object of her desire: her next-door neighbour. Sadly, as the quartet chases a pure and intense passion in all the wrong places, the piercing sadness of unrequited loves and the unceasing anguish of bitter obsessions linearly connect them. Does pain exist in the United States of Love?—Nick Riganas

Genre: Drama