"As you know, grandma, I’m seeing a woman" declares the protagonist of Jerzy Skolimowski’s Four Nights With Anna [trailer], which today opened the 40th Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Festival.

The film marks the Polish master’s big-screen comeback after a 17-year absence and a return to his homeland after 60 years. The director certainly hasn’t lost his taste for the bizarre. For Léon is talking to his grandmother’s grave, and Anna, the woman he loves, knows nothing about the nocturnal visits that this enigmatic suitor pays her.
In the streets of a dreary village of scattered run-down buildings looms the sturdy and awkward Léon (Artur Steranko), who works at the local hospital where he incinerates corpses. Revisiting one of his favourite themes – man’s inability to adapt to the world – Skolimowski (who co-wrote the screenplay with Ewa Piaskowska) explores the character’s obsessive love for Anna (Kinga Preis), a nurse whose violent rape Léon witnessed a few years previously and for which he was wrongfully convicted due to his communication difficulties.

Skilfully weaving a sinister mystery, the filmmaker traces the developments in this voyeuristic obsession, which involve spying, the preparation of sleeping tablets so as to be left in peace and nocturnal incursions into Anna’s room. Skolimowski explains: "My intention is to explore the rational aspects in this seemingly irrational and psychotic behaviour".

This is successfully achieved via the repetitive narrative structure that contains little by way of explanation, the sparse dialogue and meticulous attention to the details of everyday life, not to mention the accomplished directorial style (in particular the inventiveness of the scenes filmed in the small space of Anna’s room) and the clean and fluid cinematography.

Four Nights With Anna succeeds in painting a fatalistic portrait of the relationship between the individual and society, whilst introducing subtle touches of romanticism that contrast with the merciless violence of the world. Produced by Paolo Branco for French company Alfama Films (51% investment) and Polish-based Skopia Film (49%), in collaboration with Wild Bunch and Telewizja Polska (TVP), Four Nights With Anna was made on a budget of €1.86m. This included a €150,000 grant from the National Film Centre’s foreign-language film fund.

The film will be released in France by Les Films du Losange and in Poland by Gutek Film. International sales are being handled by French company Elle Driver.