An Academy Award nominee and a rediscovery are the subjects of this week’s film review column.

This Polish language film is nominated for Academy Awards for both Best Foreign Language Film and Achievement in Cinematography and rightly so. It is an intense film experience that builds in its power through the understated way director Pawel Pawlikowski tells his story.

Set in the early 1960s in Poland, Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is about to take her vows as nun at the convent that has been her home since she was a baby. The Mother Superior instructs her, though, to go visit her aunt, before the ceremony.

Her Aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza) is a hard-drinking sexually active single woman who was a feared prosecutor in the 1950s sending people to their deaths for crimes against the Communist state. She is now a judge.

She had a chance to be Anna’s guardian but had turned it down and now is faced with a relative she doesn’t know. At first reluctant to speak with her, Wanda reveals that Anna is Jewish and her parents were killed during World War II. Anna wants to visit her parents’ grave, and Wanda agrees to a road trip to the country.

While one might think the movie is about Anna’s journey into understanding her past, it is really Wanda’s story in many ways. Here is a person who has repressed much of her life in order to survive and taking this trip with Anna re-opens wounds long since thought healed.

Despite the revelations, this is not a “dramatic” film. It is a quiet story that reflects the society in which it is set. Fear of the past and the present dominates the emotional landscape for many of the characters we meet.

Shot in black and white, the film has a cold hard feel to it, reflecting the political landscape in Poland as well as the time of year the story was set.

This is an intriguing film that features two nuanced performances. Trzebuchowska as Anna is a person guided by her faith and a sense of what she needs to do to understand her origins. Kulesza as Wanda is a person who is actively trying to forget the pain of her past, while maintaining the control her position requires.

This is a film that is well worth your time if you’re looking for something that is definitely non-Hollywood. It is also available on Amazon, GooglePlay, iTunes and on DVD and Blu-ray.

On Blu-ray: Syncopation
This 1942 film by director William Dieterle may be a well-intentioned look at the development of jazz to swing music told through the story of a young woman from New Orleans (Bonita Granville) and a street kid from Chicago (Jackie Cooper), but has one huge flaw.

The film begins with scenes that show the musical roots of jazz came from Africa through the slave trade. Fast forward to New Orleans and 1906, and African Americans are the people who have given birth to the earliest forms of jazz. The film has several African-American characters who play jazz, but once the narrative leaves New Orleans, the story no longer includes any mention of African American musicians, with the exception of one character.

In a movie the purports to show the development of the art form, the African American contributions simply don’t exist. There is no Jelly Roll Morton, no Dixieland, no Louis Armstrong and no King Oliver.

While I understand this film was not intended to be a formal history of jazz, contemporary audiences might see it as insulting to the musicians who actually developed it. Perhaps the producers at the Cohen Film Collection anticipated this criticism by including vintage musical shorts featuring Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith and Cab Calloway among others that offer the viewer a more authentic taste of the music from the period. 

The film concludes with a musical number featuring musicians selected through a poll offered by the Saturday Evening Post that included Charlie Barnett, Benny Goodman, Harry James, Gene Krupa, Alvino Rey and Joe Venuti in what is essentially a novelty act.