You Have No Idea How Much I Love You movie review… | Little White Lies

You Have No Idea How Much I Love You

15 Feb 2018 / Released: 16 Feb 2018

Close-up of a pensive woman with curly blonde hair, pale skin, and a nose ring, gazing intensely.
Close-up of a pensive woman with curly blonde hair, pale skin, and a nose ring, gazing intensely.
2

Anticipation.

Watching other people going through therapy. Is this torture?

3

Enjoyment.

Takes a good while to synch with the film’s unique rhythm.

4

In Retrospect.

Revelatory by the time of its emotional closing scenes.

Pol­ish direc­tor Pawel Lozin­s­ki presents an immer­sive, inti­mate por­trait of a moth­er-daugh­ter relationship.

On paper, it sounds like some­thing close to pun­ish­ment, but the real­i­ty is quite dif­fer­ent. Pol­ish direc­tor Pawel Lozin­s­ki adopts a bold approach to chron­i­cling the slow and com­plex heal­ing process of a dam­aged rela­tion­ship between a moth­er and daugh­ter. Three cam­era angles, each a sin­gle a close-up por­trait of a face, cap­ture the con­fes­sions of moth­er, daugh­ter and a male ther­a­pist who fires out ques­tions and light­ly inter­prets answers.

The result is immer­sive, inti­mate and reveal­ing, a naked tor­rent of pure emo­tion and a paean to the pow­er of ver­bal self expres­sion. The film – named after a line uttered by the moth­er as tears stream down her cheek – oper­ates as a loud endorse­ment for diplo­ma­cy when it comes to mat­ters of the human heart, and it’s also rep­re­sen­ta­tive of how, even when we can’t find the words to match our sen­ti­ments, there’s are always alter­na­tive and round­about way to com­mu­ni­cate our true feelings.

Even though this is a very spe­cif­ic case, and the ses­sion we’re watch­ing takes place across a num­ber of dif­fer­ent time frames, Lozin­s­ki gives the impres­sion that these are unex­pur­gat­ed con­fes­sion­als, and the impact they deliv­er is uni­ver­sal. There isn’t much inter­est in the domes­tic ten­sions that exist between these two peo­ple, more the diplo­mat­ic act of attempt­ing to patch up the evi­dent rifts.

As a view­er (or voyeur?) you are forced to search for nuance in the words used to try and untan­gle the mys­tery of why this war was waged in the first place. Or maybe it isn’t a war – more a slow­burn crum­bling of rela­tions across and unde­ter­mined peri­od. And if the words don’t help, look to the eyes or the facial expressions.

It’s a film about talk­ing as a form ther­a­py, espous­ing the notion that some­times by sim­ply say­ing some­thing out loud you are able to take own­er­ship of it. Although some mild détente is even­tu­al­ly met between these two strangers, the note of cli­mat­ic hope is fleet­ing. Maybe they start­ed tus­sling again by the time they reached the car park?

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