Filmmaker Michal Kwiecinski on his biopic of Frederic Chopin

“Put all of your soul into it, play the best way you are feeling.” It has been nearly 175 years since Frederic Chopin’s soul was snatched away into the ether by tuberculosis on the age of 39. However, the complexity of his persona and the beguiling, bittersweet melancholy of his music, stay on.

From Kolkata to Calgary, wherever a toddler is launched to piano, the poet of the piano holds his hand via the musical alleys of etudes, preludes, ballads, and mazurkas to succeed in the ultimate objective: simplicity.

The son of Poland, whose coronary heart nonetheless resides in a Warsaw church, has been a topic of quite a few cinematic and literary portrayals. This week, the fiftieth version of the Polish Film Festival inGdynia opened with a brand new, pulsating biopic of the virtuoso. Helmed by famous Polish filmmaker Michal Kwiecinski, Chopin Chopin! captures the genius of Chopin within the Romantic Period with out submitting to his stature. It seeks to search out the scarred soul of the musician whose compositions proceed to heal the world.

Starring the younger and intense Eryk Kulm within the lead position, the movie portrays tuberculosis because the villain of the piece, and his rumbustious affiliation with sturdy, impartial ladies, in addition to how the sickness and need got here collectively to outline his music. While Kulm feels he was destined to play the half resulting from his love for the piano, Kwiecinski, in an unique interview with The Hindu, the place he discusses the movie’s emotional and visible design, says he was the one Polish actor who might play Chopin. 

By uncover the enduring legacy of Frederic Chopin via a brand new biopic, captures the genius and complexity of the Romantic composer

“Earlier depictions of Chopin offered him and his music as ‘sluggish’ whereas my analysis suggests in any other case. He wished to current Chopin as ‘a rockstar of his instances’ whom the society cherished. “He was energetic and spontaneous, a king of society.”

He compares the Parisian society’s wrestle with cholera and tuberculosis, to how we took time to determine COVID. “People didn’t know the way to cope with the sickness and fell to superstitions and shamans to discover a remedy. The sickness affected his romantic pursuits and created a posh bond between the thought and expression of affection that takes a mercurial form on display screen. Chopin, Kwiencinski feels, put the deep emotion of affection into his music.

“He transported the emotion into music reasonably than to the individual.” The melancholy finds expression via his visible design as nicely; daylight, a potion for a wilting Chopin, turns into a metaphor for hope that shines via his window when it’s too late.

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Discussing Chopin’s open relationship with French novelist George Sand, Kwiecinski notes that she sought closeness to the genius however didn’t want to bind him in an outlined relationship. “In her letters to Chopin’s buddy, she writes she didn’t thoughts him with different ladies so long as he continued to offer her mental stimulation.”

Kwiecinski, who has been to India many instances, is keen to showcase Chopin Chopin! at the upcoming International Film Festival of India and the Kolkata Film Festival. Chopin Chopin! is about to launch in 45 nations in October. The director says that he has a script a couple of Polish businessman and an Indian employee set in Kolkata and is keen to make it occur.

(The author is in Poland on the invitation of the Polish Film Festival and the Polish Institute in New Delhi).