Writer and director Magnus Von Horn's Sweat is the best feature film about social media influencer culture to date—and a testimony to the lasting arthouse factory that is the Polish National Film School in Łódź (place of origin for Andrzej Wajda, Roman Polanski, Krzysztof Kieślowski, and others). Swedish-born Von Horn relocated to Poland for the film school and chose to remain. Critics so prone accordingly described his first feature, The Here After (2015)—a tragic meditation on the generational transmission of toxic masculinity—as combining Scandinavian aesthetics with a Slavic range of emotion. Von Horn himself describes the camera in that first film as “a cat” (observant, aloof) whereas Sweat's camerawork (by Michal Dymek, of Cold War (2018) fame, mimicking verité sufficiently to make us forget the fiction) follows lead actress Magdalena Koleśnik with more devotion than her puppy.
Koleśnik, as fitness personality Sylwia Zajac, carries the mostly one-woman show. The film slams us at the start with her exaggeratedly wide blue-eyed face, long blonde pony-tail (all real, she assures fans), pointy manicure, and penchant for Barbie pink as she whips a crowd of Warsaw mall shoppers into sweaty ecstasy with a routine of planks, jogging in place, and positive affirmations. The influencer job is new, but the stage and backstage dynamics of performance are as old as art: Sylwia is any singer, actress, preacher, or public speaker tapping into the energy required to perform presence—and to genuinely move others through one's own skillful artifice (and suppressed pain). Koleśnik, whose prior background is in theater, does not hesitate to portrays Sylwia as a kindred professional, and an artist.
Indeed, much of the film's tension arises from the pettily cruel clichés it skillfully uses to misguide us. For this social media influencer is no more shallow, narcissistic, or fake than anyone else in the post-globalized Poland that serves as the flat backdrop. We see little trace of religion or politics as modes of social organization but only malls, screens, Sylwia's more-Barbie-than-Barbie self-stylization, Roxette's “The Look” on the radio—even a puppy is named “Jackson.” (I'm reminded of the scathing depiction of Korean America-philia in Bong Joon-ho's 2019 Parasite.) Yet the more we watch and prepare to judge, the more Sylwia and her sorry stalker (who parks and masturbates near her apartment building, then sends weepy videos of apology) start to seem more human than the normals around them. Himbo fellow trainer Klaudiusz reveals himself to be cut from the same cloth as the stalker, only less self-aware and violent. Sylwia's female fans are no less shudder-inducing as they snatch at her life and body (a body they “want,” especially in pieces).
A birthday visit to her middle-aged mother—in hair curlers, in a post-socialist party scene that jolts us into remembering that another era, culture, and really civilization is still alive and kicking in adjoining apartments—pretty quickly reveals what is “wrong” with Sylwia. The screen offers a sad facsimile of love from her 600,000 followers, but so does sex (in Sweat an entirely solo act that Sylwia views with the same squeamish disgust as high calorie desert). When she too sobs about her loneliness in a video post, jeopardizing her promotional contracts, Sylwia is right. Nobody loves her. None of these people know how to love. The only exception may be that silly little dog—and the ultimately compassionate camera, which in the end seems to agree (if a touch self-ironically) with Sylwia's teary but defiant last line of defense: weak and pathetic people are the most beautiful.
