Life without love and connections can be a cage of loneliness. And so can a hotel, even if it is a decadent luxury hotel in Venice full of people. Accept Our Sincere Apologies, the kaleidoscopic and at times dream-like second feature from writer-director Juja Dobrachkous (Bebia, à mon seul désir), takes us inside such a hotel and on a kaleidoscopic, visceral, and surreal journey.
The black-and-white thriller/drama, world premiering in the Harbour strand of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) on Jan. 31, follows general manager Eva, who fulfills guests’ every wish and ends up drawn to an enigmatic woman known as the Contessa. Once a sanctuary, the hotel has become a cage that both women long to escape.
Indeed, beneath the surface of Eva’s composed exterior is a troubled soul, struggling with guilt, trauma and demons that she is trying to keep at bay.
And its logline mysteriously asks: “Even if death turns you away, what then? Are you finally truly free?” IFFR’s website calls the film “a hypnotic gothic fantasy that seduces and unsettles.”
The film features a cast of mostly non-professional actors. Krista Kosonen from Finland stars as the Contessa, while Polish twins Oskar Grzelak and Kacper Grzelak portray Eva and a ghostlike vision of her stillborn twin.
Auteur Dobrachkous, who was born in the USSR and since leaving Moscow has lived in Paris, Los Angeles and London before settling in Venice, wrote the screenplay and directed and produced Accept Our Sincere Apologies. Cinematography was handled by Veronica Solovyeva, and editing by Andrey Klychnikov. Atoms & Void is handling sales on the Twice a Day production.
Dobrachkous, who is also an author, talked to THR about her love for storytelling in black and white, casting twins as Eva, and her plans for a film based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and another film about a snobbish Italian aristocrat.
The filmmaker shared that she usually has several stories in her head and in the works at the same time, but she felt this was the right time for Accept Our Sincere Apologies. “I usually find that it is time for one story because it is more disturbing for me,” she told THR. “Right now, the world is such a strange place where I feel absolute solitude and loneliness, even in crowded places. I feel this leaking of identity from me.”
The film is therefore set in a place full of people, focusing on two who struggle in different ways. “This story about a hotel in Venice and the maze that it and the city are was kicking and stretching me from the inside,” Dobrachkous shared. “There are completely different types of people from different countries, languages, and with different problems, and it’s like a huge machine. I seriously believe that a hotel can chew you up and spit you out as a completely different you. You can become a different type of person, even during a few days in a hotel. Some people love to do that. Some people can’t stand it.”
Dobrachkous wondered what a manager, who is part of this huge mechanism, would do “without an understanding of who she is and what she’s doing,” she recalled. “She’s just a part of the machine. So, what would happen if she met someone who is the complete opposite, and what kind of sparks could they feel? What is it? Love, not love?”
The contessa comes across like a fountain of social energy and love at first sight. But when getting closer to her, it becomes clear that she is also more aimless and less balanced than she seems. “The theme that I hope to touch on with the film is this loss of identity and loneliness in the world right now,” Dobrachkous told THR.
Eva is serving the hotel and its guests but is in need of attention and care herself. The casting of the role proved challenging. “I needed someone with a sense of ‘I don’t know who I am and I’m looking for something. Am I machine or not? Do I have emotions?’ So, I wanted to find someone who is somewhat unrecognizable, something like an alien creature,” the filmmaker recalled. “I was actually telling my casting people that I am looking for this alien.”
When they found the Grzelak twins, “I was completely ‘Wow, this is what I need!’,” the director recalls. “And Oskar and Kacper were these amazing aliens when they came to Venice. You can’t surprise Venice a lot, but the are so tall and had this wow factor and really grabbed the attention of everyone around them.”
Except for one cast member, the actors were non-professionals, similar to Dobrachkous‘ first feature. “I seriously believe in non-professionals, because they can’t lie. They can just be themselves, not play a persona,” she told THR about her process. “Usually, none of them know the script. You push them to just be themselves. And then you use their performances like color from a palette.”
The hotel itself is also a character in Accept Our Sincere Apologies, but the movie was actually shot in five different hotels. “It’s very difficult to find corridors in Venice hotels,” the writer-director explained. “Most of the hotels in Venice are old palazzo-style private houses that don’t have any corridors. This film was made in five different hotels – some of them did have corridors, but the rooms were very modern. Some of them had a nice dining room, but didn’t have a kitchen. So we had to shoot in different places.”
Just like in the case of her feature debut, Dobrachkous again chose to tell her latest tale in black and white. She explained that she loves watching old black-and-white films herself, with Robert Bresson one of her favorites. Plus, she said that she wants to develop further as a filmmaker before considering taking on color, “because color is something sacred for me.”
Accept Our Sincere Apologies is a visceral experience, rather than “just” a narrative, for audiences. If you feel a sense of claustrophobia, the director is happy. “I did all the story boards with tight close-ups so you feel like you can’t breathe, you are too close. Everything is too much, and the rooms are not big enough,” she told THR. “The hotel is like the Titanic.”
Dobrachkous is already working on two more feature ideas. One is be based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and explores mythological themes based on various real-life stories. “It’s 6$3 story of a woman who lost her husband, and the man of her life that felt complete,” the auteur shared. “She was completely obsessed with him, and when she loses him, she is completely lost and lies to her parents that he went to the Isle of Skye. And she starts to tell more and more stories and starts to completely believe in her own lies. So, this is a story about how she recreates the universe, little by little.”
The second idea, which she wants to shoot in Italy, revolves around “an old aristocrat, a snobbish Italian aristocrat who lives alone, hates everything, loves himself, doesn’t want to be disturbed and suddenly hears from the doctor’s office and realizes that he has a worm inside of him,” Dobrachkous told THR. “I want to do this one as soon as possible and would love to have Toni Servillo for it. It’s about humans and transformation.”
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