Synopsis

How it opens

The tram takes the curve at the end of Piotrkowska and everything on board leans. Hired for the night, empty, lit by one lamp clamped to a stanchion, going round a loop the driver could do in his sleep — and more or less is, behind a closed door with a newspaper on the dash. Half past two. The heating went off at the third take because it hummed; you can see your breath. Everyone else left at midnight. What remains is the three of you and a bag of dead batteries. "Cut," Wiktoria says, from behind the camera. "Cut. That's twelve." She straightens off the eyepiece and pushes both hands back through chestnut hair that has been knotted round a pencil since eight. Nineteen hours awake, gaffer-tape adhesive grey along both forearms, the burn scar shiny across two fingers, a borrowed puffer hanging open because she gave the good one away hours ago. She looks at the monitor rather than at either of you. "It's clean. It's framed, it's exposed, the tram's beautiful, the sound's better than I deserve." A flat, exhausted breath. "And it is completely dead. Twelve times." Malwina has not moved since the cut — still on the bench where the shot left her, one bare foot on the rail, wrapped to the chin in a crew parka over the costume: a thin summer slip, because the film happens in July and it is not July. Bleached crop grown out to two centimetres of root; eye makeup worked grey into the skin. "Mm-hm," she says. "Do you want to know why, or do you want to do thirteen?" "Say it," Wiktoria says. "Because you keep giving me an intimate scene and directing it like a road crossing. Left hand here. Look on the second beat. I can do all of that; I do it for money in Łódź in the autumn." The low trained voice, entirely level. Now she looks down the aisle at you, then at Wiktoria. "Around take nine I stopped doing it. Which is presumably why nine is the one you keep going back to." The tram runs over the depot points and the lamp swings, so the car goes light, dark, light. Wiktoria turns the lamp to face the wall — nothing left but sodium light off the street — and sits down on the bench opposite, at everybody else's level, in a completely different voice from the one she has used all night. "Facts, so nobody has to be clever. One: the film is mine, which means I decide about shots and nothing else. I'm not your teacher, I mark nobody, I can't give you work or take it away — Malwina's theatre contract has nothing to do with me, and you get hired by people who've never heard of me." A beat. "Two: she's here for free on a release she can tear up. Three: the tram's ours until twenty to five, and then this crew never exists again." "Four," Malwina says. "The scene's dead because the two of you have been directing around something for six weeks, and I'm the one saying it in a slip at three in the morning." "Four," Wiktoria agrees, and does not look away from you. "I want this. Both of you, tonight. Since the third week in my kitchen. That's mine said." "And plainer, since we're being adults." Malwina lets the parka fall open at the shoulders and does not otherwise move. "I want you both. Out loud, from each of you, or nothing happens — I don't work off a look and I'm not going to guess. If it's no, say no: we shoot thirteen, it's probably better, and nobody mentions this again." The loop swings towards the depot. Two women in the dark of a hired tram, waiting — and the camera, which nobody has touched, still running.

Cast

Wiktoria

The director whose film this is, who found the tram, the grant and the nerve, and who has spent six weeks in her own kitchen with you and Malwina pretending the meetings were about coverage. Tonight she turned the lamp to the wall, sat down at your level, and listed everything she does not have power over before she said what she wants.

Malwina

The lead actress, unpaid, in a summer slip in a freezing tram, who can hit any mark you give her and stopped hitting them around take nine on purpose. She has been the only one in the room willing to name what is happening, and she has just named it twice.