DIVORCE/ ROZWODICY
Poland, 2024, 91 minutes, Colour.
Magdalena Poplawska, Wojciech Mecwaldowski, Tomasz Schuchardt, Michal Pawlik, Szymon Kjsmider.
Directed by Michal Chacinski, Radoslaw Drabik
Poland has had a successful film industry over many decades, especially with some world-class filmmakers during the period of the Soviet Union. It has a strong, traditional Catholic background and tradition but, into the 21st-century, also a strong secular perspective and lifestyle, including divorce and remarriage. Which means then that there is a perspective on the Catholic Church and its regulations in terms of marriage, annulments and divorce.
The film focuses on a couple, 20 years or so after their separation, the wife having now been married again for 17 years and with a daughter, the man living his rather carefree life but now falling in love with a young woman – and her wanting a white wedding in the church, the ambition also of her family. The couple are divorced – so the issue of an annulment of the first marriage, which they don’t quite understand, thinking that a declaration of annulment something is simply the equivalent of the Catholic Church approving a divorce, something that can simply be asked for and received.
Which is not the case.
The screenplay does make it clear throughout the film, not immediately picked up by the couple, and, perhaps, not immediately picked up by the audience. For the annulment of a marriage contract in the church, there have to be good reasons, including establishing the fact that there was not full consent in the first place.
The couple have a plan, go to the church authorities, expecting an immediate formal assent because of their civil divorce and remarriage according to the state law. When required to go through with the first Instance of a hearing before a clerical board, they decide that they would explain that the groom was drunk, could not put the wedding ring on his wife’s finger, getting some testimony from friends and witnesses. However, somebody discovers a video of the wedding which sabotages, somewhat, the argument and alleged evidence. The wife goes along with this – although, impatient with the process, she remembers being in love, but the pregnancy and then the wedding, her husband being young, irresponsible.
At the first Instance, the local diocesan hearing, there are two clergy, one a serious priest who asks all the detailed formal questions, assisted by a young priests, looking inexperienced, the wife asking him his age, 28. He tries to be very friendly. The visits and the interrogations and answers blend the serious and the farcical in the screenplay. The annulment is not granted.
Which moves according to the Church’s Canon Law, to the second Instance, much more formal in the interrogation, the priest serious, meticulous in detail. The young priest is there again as well is a notary. There are witnesses, the wife, becoming impatient, eavesdropping on the witness, caught by the husband, barging in on the formalities, but the same arguments and no annulment. They try an old friend but he has given up drinking and can’t testify. They offer him money and the friend’s wife demands more!
In the third Instance, there is an appeal to the Vatican tribunal, an Italian monsignor on the zoom meeting, a translator present, the calling in of the marriage celebrant, but his advanced age, seeming to remember well but the couple tricking him about the place where he baptised their daughter. His credibility is undermined. But, ironically, the connection was faulty at this stage of the interrogation. The wife, however, feels very strongly about the whole process and speaks her mind.
The value of the process is that the wife, not a believer, does assess the initial marriage, difficulties with her teenage daughter, her relationship with her devoted husband while the man does come to some kind of sense but, after one of the sessions, he actually proposition his former wife…
Finally, there is a wedding, and it is the young priest who is presiding, white wedding, everybody happy, and the final image of a wink from the young priest…
An addendum: the wife is a music teacher at the school with the school band and they have to go to the opening of a railway station (still functioning but refurbished) and a political opportunity for the local member), and the ceremony includes a solemn blessing from a Bishop.