Apolonia, Apolonia
What makes an artist? Not just the desire to create but the desire to do so above all else, the will to follow that impulse through and the luck to succeed. A lot of biopics have attempted to answer that question, usually by reciting the defining elements of their lives in an orderly progression of events, perhaps with some dramatics focused on at certain specific moments in time. They usually come to few if any answers because people are more than just the events that happened to them. Director Lea Glob was gifted with the opportunity to follow the life of an esteemed artist in the making, to watch them create themselves in real time over years and realize that she is asking it of herself (and the price to be paid for it), as well.
Over the last 10 years Apolonia Sokol has carved out a niche for herself as one of the foremost new contemporary painters, focusing on figurative studies (frequently but not always women) in ambiguous moods and locations hinting at the depth of life in individuals beyond the single moments in time her canvases capture. Before that happened, however she was a struggling artist moving from city to city and gallery to gallery trying to find out what these figures mean to herself or to anyone else and if she even has something to say. And before that she was an intelligent young woman with a unique background, growing up in a small theater in Paris owned by her parents where she seemed destined to live a life in the arts. Was it because of her bohemian parents, because of the nomadic existence she lives after the her parent’s divorce, something deep inside of her from before birth, or none of those things?
Glob’s film knows better than to make any definitive statements but we can make some inferences. Sokol’s own parents, beyond putting her in the midst of creation as avocation from her youngest age also filmed much of her early life (including her conception and birth) to show back to her as an adult an give her a view on where she came from in a raw manner most wouldn’t. It opens a world to Glob, of Sokol as a young woman questioning what she wants out of life even as the foundation of her childhood is removed forcing her and her mother to relocate to Denmark. As an art student she is no different than any other 20 year old, primarily concerned with externalities like what will happen with her home, what will happen with her friend Oksana – a Ukranian ex-pat fighting against Russian aggression years before the actual invasion – and will she pass her exams.
Years later, having begun to navigate the fickle art world and its need of patronage to continue, she has become more than a subject for Glob. She is almost an anti-thesis, a woman who has turned her back on sort of domestic life – giving up any thought on children or family – to apply herself entirely into figuring out her creative self and how to make it work as a career and a life. Glob by comparison works with her husband and compares the difficulties of making that life work (including a very difficult birth that makes future children impossible) almost as a condemnation of Sokol has chosen to give up versus what Glob is forced to.
And yet she also clearly sees much of herself in Sokol as well as each focuses on portraits of women in an attempt to understand theme and the world. Gradually Glob finds herself drawn more and more into Sokol’s orbit like a real-life Persona, having conversations while Sokol bathes and even at one point training her own camera on herself while left alone in Sokol’s apartment. Is she making her film because Sokol herself is such an interesting person (yes) or is it to understand herself and the choices she has made in her life (also yes)?
Gradually, as real life always does, people move on. Sokol moves continually around the world, unmoored from life around her, following her muse wherever it takes her including fellowships and awards, as the the things which were once of paramount importance in her life fall away and are forgotten, suggesting perhaps they were not what made her such an interesting artist in the first place. Does Apolonia, Apolnia ever really answer its own questions? No, but not because it can’t, but because it realizes at the end that there is no answer.
8 out of 10.
Apolonia Sokol, Hervé Breuil, Lea Glob, Oksana Shachko and Alexandra Tlolka. Directed by Lea Glob.