Apolonia, Apolonia

Apolonia, Apolonia

An artist’s path is never straight or easy. For women, especially, who create art as an expression of their unique experiences in the world, it can be even harder.

Lea Glob’s “Apolonia, Apolonia” a mesmerizing film that reveals itself like a slowly forming abstract painting acknowledges this truth in countless ways and with many kinds of love. She also puts forward another necessary argument about femininity and creativity by way of her doc-making presence, which is everywhere in the movie without ever being intrusive or aggressive. The result is an object that thinks hard about friendship, culture, sex work and capitalism; about different selves living in the same bodies under impossible conditions.

So it’s not exactly your typical fly on the wall documentary portrait aimed at Oscar voters (though this one did sneak onto the Academy’s shortlist for best nonfiction feature). Apolonia herself wouldn’t stand for such clichés; nor would Glob. The movie is instead an experiment in what happens when subject becomes filmmaker becomes subject again a hybrid as jagged and lovable as Apolonia’s smile lines.

At first glance, Apolonia seems to have all the promise and good luck that any painter could wish for. Raised among artists in an underground theater commune in Paris, she studies at the prestigious Beaux-Arts de Paris and spends years leading a bohemian paradise life in what has to be one of the most beautiful cities on Earth: Atelier 17 Theatre Paradisio (formerly Le Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord), where she grew up.

But each time Glob returns to her over 13 years of shooting this film (they met in 2009), more and more of what made Apolonia so successful as an artist seems to be slipping through her fingers as she tries mightily to build something real and good with her life. And ours. Many things that are seemingly easy for her male peers and perhaps even easier for those less talented prove stubbornly hard, if not impossible. In one scene, she complains about some male professors in a voice heavy with anger. When one of them insults her paintings by saying they’re not as interesting as she is, Glob wonders in voice-over: Would they have said that to a male artist? You understand why both women are so pissed off.

However, Apolonia continues to follow her chosen path even though she loses her theater community and is forced to live in a cramped apartment with her mother and Oksana, a feminist artist from Ukraine who is seeking asylum. The most beautiful part of the film is the relationship between these two women who have sworn off marriage, children, and everything they think is patriarchal; as they deal with problems together (and sometimes apart), it becomes clear that this friendship is what makes life worth living for each of them, and no matter how hard things get especially when Oksana’s fragile mental health takes a turn for the worse they will stick by one another.

“‘Apolonia, Apolonia’ works best when its eponymous artist bounces around different cities and eventually ends up in America. New York doesn’t work out so she goes to Los Angeles” She meets Stefan Simchowitz there a vampire-like collector who enables artists commercially but only under his terms (he has been called “the art world’s patron Satan” by The New York Times) and gets dazzled by all the money he could throw at her: among other things, he offers her a studio space. But it’s impossible for Apolonia to keep up with his demands that she make at least twice as many pieces per month as she ever has before; after all, she thrives on inspiration whereas commercialism kills her spirit.

Finally, Apolonia comes back to what she calls “the old world” in an attempt to rebuild an artistic career on her own terms. At this point Glob starts turning the camera on herself more frequently she went through a difficult pregnancy while making this film, and suffered physically from it afterwards and finds yet another female artist within herself who must grapple with new priorities men rarely face; but still & yet then again so what? women always fight on forever don’t they?. This isn’t an ending but a beginning, or rather another start; it’s not about stopping but starting over; it isn’t finality but possibility for women’s spirits are always ready to go fighting on forever aren’t they?.

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