Film “Wanda, my miracle” in the cinema: Chaos on Lake Zurich – Culture

Get a Polish woman. This is what some people in the West like to call it when grandma or grandpa can no longer cope with everyday life and a foreign nurse is hired for them. It is almost exclusively women, mostly from Eastern Europe, who leave their own families behind to look after the relatives of strangers. Wanda (Agnieszka Grochowska) is one of them. The fact that she actually comes from Poland and not from Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, the Czech Republic or Romania shouldn’t really matter to the Swiss family she works for, as “the Polish woman” is just a synonym for cheap care work from the East is. Where exactly the nurses come from, what they leave behind, who they actually are, such details are of little interest to many employer families.

If Europe is a house, then the Eastern European care workers live in the maid’s room – in Wanda’s case, that can be taken literally. It is located in the basement, in a room with access from the kitchen, although there might also be enough space on the upper floors of the villa. When you see the spacious property on Lake Zurich with its own jetty, old trees and a fantastic view of the lake and the mountains for the first time, the prosperity of the Wegmeister-Gloor family literally jumps on you. Josef (André Jung) made his fortune in building materials, now the patriarch is disabled and bedridden after a stroke.

Wanda, who is returning from home leave in Poland, is greeted enthusiastically by him, and the rest of the family is also happy about the caretaker, who is always in a good mood. Wife Elsa (Marthe Keller) appreciates the professional relief and forces Wanda to do household chores for little more money. The adult son Gregor, called Gregi (Jacob Matschenz), is a little in love with the pretty Polish woman.

Wanda doesn’t seem like a victim, we’re not in a Ken Loach film here

Wanda also seems to like the family, especially Josef, whom she looks after – maybe because neither of them really belong. Director Bettina Oberli, who also wrote the script together with Cooky Ziesche, does not give the viewer a chance to romanticize this relationship. Josef gives Wanda money, so she has sex with him. It’s a shock, but only a small one: Wanda doesn’t seem like a victim, but appears as a self-confident, confident businesswoman who likes to do her care work and accepts the occasional prostitution because as a single mother she needs the money. Her self-confidence is good, we are not in a Ken Loach film here: Instead of faces and stories tanned by life, we watch Wanda, magically embodied by Agnieszka Grochowska, as she first sweetened the Swiss family’s life – and then on the Head turns.

“Wanda, mein Wunder” is a hilarious tragic comedy with a penchant for farce: sparklingly sweet like champagne with strawberries, with which, however, whistles are served for the affluent Swiss. The film has three chapters, and Wanda returns to Switzerland from Poland three times. The second time she is pregnant from Josef, the head of the family. It literally blossoms and can suddenly even walk again. But his wife Elsa is beside herself when she learns of Joseph’s later fatherhood.

Trailer for the film:

Decades of frustration emerged behind the facade of the Swiss upper class lady. Marthe Keller plays it wonderfully: Elsa’s conceit, her iron effort to create a facade of solidity, her repressed inferiority complex. Her Elsa is the second center of the film alongside Agnieszka Grochowskas Wanda. “Wanda, mein Wunder” is actually an ensemble film, with great actors, in which the focus is less on the plight of the Eastern European guest workers and more on complex characters and complicated family relationships. Gregi is a Weirdo, a strange, unfamiliar owl who collects stuffed birds and imitates bird calls; in another film he might be mistaken for a perverted woman murderer. Father Josef recognizes the arrival of daughter Sophie (Birgit Minichmayr) by the sound of her five-car BMW, and this career woman is just as aggressive as her car. Birigit Minichmayr obviously enjoys showing off this highly frustrated catastrophe in a bow-tie blouse. Even when she lets herself go later (which should be very rare with Sophie), she still presses her elbows tightly and in a controlled manner against her body.

Envy and greed, prejudice and conceit result in a cinematic hurricane, with Wanda and her baby as an oasis of calm in the middle. First, the child is seen as a threat to Wegmeister-Gloor’s legacy, then it is supposed to satisfy Sophie’s unfulfilled longing for a baby. When Wanda’s Polish family turns up in Switzerland, the west-east family constellation is complete. Josef sees it as a dream: Arcadia on Lake Zurich. Family relationships are actually too dynamic for that: if Europe is a house, a lot is currently being rebuilt.

Wanda, my miracle, Switzerland 2020 – Director: Bettina Oberli. Book: Cooky Ziesche, B. Oberli. Camera: Judith Kaufmann. With: Agnieszka Grochowska, Marthe Keller, André Jung, Jacob Matschenz, Birgit Minichmayr, Anatole Taubman. Distribution: X-Films, 111 minutes.