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As anyone who has made a great-author biopic (or even watched one, for that matter) can tell you, writing is among the hardest professions to make cinematic. The slow churn of ideas, the second-guessing and self-editing,
and even those rare, exhilarating surges of creative flow are all part of a stubbornly interior, usually static process. Small wonder, then, that writer’s block is an eternally popular subject for doubtless empathetic, readily self-distracting screenwriters: Dramatic possibilities open up considerably when a character is doing something, anything, other than what they’re supposed to be doing. Yet in “Agata the Writer” — an elegant, slippery slip of a film about writing, yes, but also about immigrant identity, trauma tourism, vulgar art, theft of property and history, and strange, dissonant homecomings away from home — those possibilities also wind up perversely misbehaving.
A debut of impressive poise and confidently willful storytelling instincts from video artist Kuba Dorabialski, “Agata the Writer” also marks a welcome return to substantial film roles for the ever-interesting, ever-quizzical Australian actress Mia Wasikowska — who, the last time we saw her in something of this approximate register, was a malleable figment of a writer’s imagination in Mia Hansen-Løve’s similarly meta but far breezier “Bergman Island.” As reference points go, however, this year’s gorgeous Canadian Oscar submission “Nina Roza” feels more tonally and thematically complementary.
Future distributors may well reach for comparisons when trying to sell this pleasingly ornery, elusive film, which will likely divide viewers with its intractable narrative swerves and culs-de-sac. But it’s among the most bracingly singular works at this year’s Venice Film Festival, where it premieres in the Giornate degli Autori (formerly known in English as Venice Days) sidebar.
The arch introductory narration, over the first of two bookending shots of a winding hillside road, will immediately clue viewers into the tone of things to come, as it drily, somewhat omnisciently articulates the mindset of Agata (Wasikowska), a Polish-Australian writer who has had some success with her satirical novels, but is pursuing a more earnest shift in creative direction. Inspired to write a story of a father-daughter relationship during the Bosnian War, she travels to Sarajevo, where she plans to stay a few months and research the project — hoping to find, in the narrator’s words, “a Slavic similitude” between her Polish roots and this otherwise unfamiliar locale.
But from the moment Agata arrives in the city, she feels conspicuously out of place. Sarajevo — nothing if not a city of contrasts, to borrow a school-report cliché — presents here as wintry and severe, not unwelcoming but not overly accommodating either, painted in damp mineral shades, with a running chorus of wind, varying in volume and intensity, but seemingly never dropping entirely. Early on, we glimpse a sound recordist (Dorabialski himself) trying to capture that natural white noise on a deserted roadside; we’ll learn his story, so to speak, far later on.
For writers of a certain melancholy persuasion, this could be an ideal environment for some productive literary brooding. But for Agata, the more she explores Sarajevo, the less she she feels she knows it. She certainly doesn’t feel confident in her ability to set a story in its most painful period of history, despite the eager encouragement of her friend and editor Davina (Mia Morrissey), and the assistance of new acquaintance Jasmina (a superb Vedrana Božinović), a brusque local theater director whose confrontational conversational style seems to expose all Agata’s blind spots. “Did you enjoy those years?” Agata blandly asks her about living through the war, and Božinović’s tone in response could cut through ice. “Enjoy? It was genocide,” she spits, before granting a smidge of mercy to the clueless outsider: “But everything was more authentic.”
Meanwhile, an unidentified thief appears to be serially targeting the art-filled house that Agata is staying in — something of a red-herring storyline that contributes to the writer’s generally destabilized air, and complements her growing sense that, as she hacks away at a phony book she feels unqualified to write, she may be some kind of art thief herself. A perfectly cast Wasikowska, always such a visible and deliberate thinker on screen, gives a lovely, tensely amusing performance as a woman whose constant second-guessing of her work spills over into an overall uncertainty of self: Agata’s artistic limbo is felt in her halting, loping gait and murmuring delivery alike.
It’s also more boldly reflected in the film’s most adventurous structural coup — as Dorabialski leaves most of his script’s narrative preoccupations dangling to immerse us fully in Agata’s incomplete creation, delivered in voiceover, stopping any action dead in its tracks. What we hear sounds less like a novel than a screenplay; we wonder if “Agata the Writer” is going to loop back into itself, though this frayed, beguiling film does nothing so tidy.
It’s a monomaniacal pivot that honors the irrational, wayward rhythms of the writing process itself, and it feels fitting that Dorabialski — who also takes solo writing, shooting, editing and scoring credit on his debut, acquitting himself stylishly on all fronts — is himself such an artistic one-man-band. A wise, knotty, subtly tricky little film, “Agata the Writer” acutely understands how necessarily lonely it is to find and tell a story, even when it comes together, though even more so when it doesn’t.
