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‘Glorious Summer’ Review: Ignorance Is Bliss in Ethereal Dystopian Drama
Helena Ganjalyan and Bartosz Szpak make an auspicious debut with this enigmatic drama about a trio of young women whose comfort comes at a cost.
Somewhere in a cinematic landscape that includes Yorgos Lanthimos and Lucile Hadžihalilović lies Helena Ganjalyan and Bartosz Szpak ’s “ Glorious Summer,” a sun-soaked allegory filled with dread in which the customs of a curiously cloistered culture begin to be questioned. Ganjalyan and Szpak would risk overcomplicating matters to go into any deeper specifics, but in wisely offering nothing about the event’s origins or the exact nature of how it unfolds, the occasion is easily understood as a test of the young women’s resolve when they approach it with only the context they’ve been able to create for themselves. A sense of authority might clue one into the fact that the film’s co-director Ganjalyan plays the de facto leader of the group, the most strident of the bunch who appears to have a slight distrust of what she’s told over the loudspeaker and her skepticism is shared by the resolutely stone-faced Magdalena Fejdasz-Hanczewska, who dutifully abides daily instructions, but only out of resignation than any belief in the system.
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