A father brings his daughter into unrelenting focus in 'Anya'
Imagine that your father has a video camera and that he never, ever puts it down. Is your relationship with him? Or with the lens?
Marian Marzynski is a Polish emigre and Brookline-based filmmaker who began filming his daughter, Anya, in infancy. When "Anya (In and Out of Focus)" ends, she is in her late 20s and headed for a teaching job in China. That she'll be as far from her father as a person can be and still remain on this planet may not be a coincidence. "Anya" is a personal diary, a proto-reality show, a one-woman "28 Up," and a record of a father's mind-boggling intrusiveness. It is worth seeing, but hardly for the reasons Marzynski thinks.
In youth, Anya is a headstrong little bull, unafraid to speak her mind, and Marzynski films her both in confidence and in raging tears. Having fled communist rule for film professorships first in Rhode Island and then at the University of Illinois, the director is a stranger in a strange land; there's a sense that Anya is both his ambassador to America and in constant danger of being lost to it. Marzynski indulges the girl while she's still a tweener, giggling with her pals, and it's only when she hits adolescence that the gloves come off.
The director is one of those dads who struggle to be friends with his daughter, even when he clearly isn't, and the record of "Anya" shows him passive-aggressively trying to mold her from his safe area behind the camera. (It's Anya's architect mother, glowering on the fringes like a distant storm cloud, who has to play bad cop.) Anya isn't beautiful, she's not a great student, she has trouble articulating her thoughts. She's a normal teenager, in other words, but that isn't good enough for Marzynski. That too may be typical for the parent of a teenager, but once you throw videotape into the mix, everything changes. Perhaps a father has a right to ask his 13-year-old if she has started menstruating -- but not on camera, and not in the final cut.
Thus a viewer sympathizes when Anya starts rebelling, walking away from the prying lens in scene after scene. Since her father doesn't see her, she seems to insist, why should his camera be allowed to?
One of the gulfs that develops between Anya and her parents is over her attraction to African-American boyfriends. This seems to bring out the overt racism in her mother, who goes off on a frightening rant while driving through an inner-city Chicago neighborhood, and it brings out the covert bigotry in Marzynski, too. He at least is willing to give the girl her say, and there's a heartbreaking sequence in which Anya pleads for him to just withhold judgment -- which in this context means turning off the camera -- while she makes her own mistakes. Not surprisingly, Anya turns out to have fairly good instincts about men in the long run.
Throughout "Anya (In and Out of Focus)," the director makes a pretense of learning as much from his daughter as she is learning from him. That this is dubious is evident from a scene where Anya negotiates with her father over what parts of her wedding he'll be allowed to film, as though she required an easement to her own life. Ostensibly, "Anya" is about coming to terms with a new culture by launching your children into it. It's not. It's proof that you can look at the world through a viewfinder and still remain blind.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
