Making a biopic is never easy and rarely successful because screenwriter and director wrangle with one of two challenges: either slickly packaging a marginalized historic figure in order to pique viewers’ interest or satisfying the fans of a famous subject by covering as many of their “iconic” memories as possible. The makers of The Art of Loving: The Story of Michalina Wisłocka have chosen a fabulous subject for a biopic—a pioneering Polish doctor-activist who campaigned for women's reproductive rights and sexual pleasure in the People's Republic of Poland (PRL). Director Maria Sadowska and screenwriter Krzysztof Rak seem undecided, however, about what would most interest viewers in the feisty female doctor. Their branding anxiety is evident in the double-barreled title. Should this movie be about Wisłocka's controversial blockbuster, The Art of Loving, finally permitted publication in 1978, bought by seven million readers, and now being reissued a thirteenth time after forty years in print? Or should this film feature the “story” of the book's author, drawing on Wisłocka's 2014 biography by Violetta Ozminkowski, provocatively titled A Sinner's Art of Love?
Sadowska and Rak decide by not deciding and hobble what might otherwise be a fine film. They privilege one plotline—the story of the book's problematic publication—as the movie's frame and conveyer belt, while inserting the fits and starts of Wisłocka's thirty-year personal and professional life as sometimes fresh, but mainly formulaic set pieces. The battle for the book quickly turns tedious, involving staged confrontations between a blunt, determined Wisłocka (accompanied by her young female sidekick) and a series of the usual antagonists (clownish Party bureaucrats, a cautious Catholic bishop, and spineless male editors). The PRL backdrop is painstakingly decorated and its minions well-costumed, but setting and villains pose none of the repressive menace at work even in Poland's swinging 1970s. Recurring shots of the heroines marching down narrow corridors towards the audience echo Agnieszka's hunt for justice in Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble, but the film ultimately settles for the feel-good vibe of Mike Nichols’ Working Girl. At every impasse, Wisłocka happens on a female beneficiary of her doctor's practice, from a young woman who is happily pregnant through Wisłocka's unusual “prescription” of a solo visit to a spa to a general's wife (a cameo played by a steely Danuta Stenka) whom Wisłocka teaches to use safe words to control her husband's sadism. Ultimately, this phalanx of the doctor's fans will join forces to push her book into print.
The richer, more intriguing plotline of Wisłocka's biography is chopped up, tagged by location and date, and interspersed into the story of the book. We witness how Wisłocka devises to solve her soul/body crisis by living in a never-quite consummated ménage à trois during World War II; the secret history of her children's births and their early childhood; random scenes of her unorthodox treatment of female patients who suffer from fear of sex, botched abortions, and domestic abuse; and the golden summer interlude during which she at last experiences true sexual satisfaction (in her 30s) with an “ugly,” yet highly experienced man (Eryk Lubos). Actress Magdalena Boczarska strives admirably to convey Wisłocka as a fast-talking, whip smart eccentric who is indifferent to how she behaves or what she wears. As the DVD packaging informs us, Boczarska prepped extensively for her part through consultations with Wisłocka's surviving daughter, Krystyna Bielewicz. Yet, given the filmmakers’ insistence on keeping the doctor's portrait caring and upbeat, Boczarska never conveys the Asperger-like mannerisms that Bielewicz ascribes to her mother (Violetta Ozminkowski and Krystyna Bielewicz, “Córka o Michalinie Wisłockiej: Kochać to ona umiała, ale nie umiała żyć,” Wywiad Gazeta.pl/weekend, March 8, 2019). In The Art of Loving, Wisłocka's character is rendered likable and unsinkable, and her disturbing mistakes left unscreened. This means, for example, that the ménage à trois that resulted in her divorce, her alienation of her best friend Wanda, and the separation of the trio's two children is filmed as a sometimes comically daring, sometimes tasteless subplot. The trio forms when Wanda (Justyna Wasilewska) saves Wisłocka and her husband (Piotr Adamczyk) from probable execution by feigning sex with a gay SS commander worried about his reputation among his men; the camera zooms in on the three hugging each other with giddy delight even as the truckload of doomed victims drives off behind them. The son and daughter whom Wisłocka loves, but has neither the time nor particular desire to raise, are dispensed with in abrupt appearances and exits. The film never bothers to explore how Wisłocka becomes intrigued with studying and teaching about safe, pleasurable sex. “Miśka” Wisłocka is simply a wacky miracle worker deserving of celebrity, and this verdict is confirmed in the film's final minutes as we literally watch copies of her book moving along an assembly line, quantitative proof of her consumer appeal.
In sum, The Art of Loving fails, as most biopics do, to convey the complex, intriguing life of its subject. I hope, nonetheless, that its makers’ gamble to package Michalina Wisłocka's work and life as a commercial success pans out. Any mass entertainment that features a likable heroine persuasively lobbying for reproductive rights, sexual education, and women's health and safety may sway a moviegoing public in Poland today, as the ruling Peace and Justice Party attacks these goals with its policies and media censorship.
