Mother daughters Sometimes a director needs to try hard to find a plot for his picture - first he discovers an interesting story telling about a unique experience experienced by a person, or vice versa about a problem that is familiar and close to a huge number of people, and then tries to understand this story and penetrate the soul of those who were its direct participant. However, there are cases when everything is much simpler, and the director needs to go after the search for a plot for a picture no further than his own life. This is how the idea for the third feature film was born by the student of the most famous independent Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi Magdalena Pekozh, who in her new work decided to tell a story that happened to her personally and is the most tragic part of her fate. In the film “Convergence” Pekozh tells about the toxic, explosive and unstable relationship of an elderly mother and her already adult daughter, based on the difficulties through which the director herself went in her life in communicating with the one who gave her birth.
The life of the main character of the film, who in her almost forty years finally decides to jump out of her mother's nest and start creating her own family, is very diverse - thirty-seven-year-old Martha is a very creative person in whose life there is no place for boredom. However, wherever she is and whatever she does, there is one constant in her life, namely a phone call from a parent that often happens at the most awkward and intimate moments, creating a sense of the mother’s constant presence, even if she is actually very far away. They say that from love to hate is one step. The relationship between Martha and her mother is much more complicated, because these two opposite feelings coexist in them on the same line, and no steps are necessary. Involuntarily, you begin to wonder what is more terrible – love that turns into a terrible addiction, or toxic hatred that blinds and deprives your mind. The struggle with the various manifestations of these two extremes is part of the everyday life of Martha and her mother, whose dramatic relationship can be envied by many lovers from melodramas, where directors need to create a thousand obstacles to make the viewer tremble in anticipation of the finale he already knows. That’s only in the picture of Magdalena Pekozh the finale is unpredictable and rushes at the viewer with all its cruelty at the most unexpected moment.
In many ways, the film “Convergence” resembles these endless calls from the mother, which the heroine receives, and we seem to hear the same signal throughout the seventy-six minutes of screen time, since the pathology in the relationship between the main character and her mother is shown in the same way. Similar motives for quarrels and similar application scenarios, and the moment something, a different kind of signal appears in the picture that could help the viewer better understand how this kind of toxic relationship could have arisen, it immediately fades. You have some small clues that you can use your imagination to try to fill in the many gaps left in the film by the director, but in general, the picture of Magdalena Pekoj deals with the consequences and manifestations of the problem, telling about them again and again, instead of making the characters of your film more vivid and alive and getting to the root cause of this in all respects tragic story.