Jasmina Wójcik’s “King Matt the First” is an enthralling peek into childhood’s many pleasures. The taste of them may linger on even if the spirit has mostly receded. The film is a tussle with eventual loss, arcing from innocence to beguilement. So much blurs away with only a faint echo of the past. One clutches onto it, the grasp slipping.
Circling her two young daughters, Lea and Zoja, Wójcik’s film puts a gentle, searching gaze on the shifting, sparkling expanse of their thoughts, whims, and fancies. Lea reiterates not wanting to grow up. When people grow up, they forget to have fun, she adds, tinged with deep regret. Though the children say they don’t understand the melancholy that they see in adults, it washes over inevitably. It comes in the not-so-desired rhythms of life crashing on one, familiar sensations replaced by new ones dripping with adult awkwardness, emotions, and hormones caught in a mess. How does one deal with this onslaught of alien feelings?
Chief among the film’s pleasures is to partake in Jakub Wróblewski’s luminous camerawork. Nature is key to its rich imaginative, inner world, a boundless sense of freedom and bubbling life-embracing curiosity stealing through every frame. Weaving an immersive network of sights, Wróblewski’s camera traces each leaf, a flower, fruit’s lusciousness—embedded in the super-sized allure nature holds to the children. In its sensual engagement with the elements, the film creates an intimate space.
“King Matt the First” unspools from the onset of the pandemic years. In a spate of online classes, Lea yearns for her friends, a sense of community that got snapped. With her elder sister, Zoja, she retreats into the natural world. Shut out from most people except family, the sisters fabricate an escape. They whisper with the wind, flowers, rolling atop trees. Making up fictional lives of well-travelled, posh women, slipping into an affect offers them much recreation.
Time feels endless, vast, and the children are seldom bored or run out of ideas on how to spend it. Gazing at cloud shapes calls up a sad memory or two, like that of their dog that’s no longer around. Associations flit through, as do plaintive, playful assertions of children for justice, equality, and wrestling back the world’s unique magic. Woven with these is a clear, cutting emphasis on opposing war. Stepping into adulthood is also linked with confronting its often vicious, dehumanising logic. The merry chirp of birds rings out over the journey from childhood to adolescence and adulthood. Wójcik harnesses children’s language, innocent perceptions, teasing out bits of calm insight.
Childhood is seeped in unguarded delight, a capacity of seeing wonder in the everyday. With adulthood comes a baggage of various kinds: expectations built, fretting over how one is perceived, fears of judgment. Zoja talks of childhood’s “blissful unconsciousness”, feeling her gradually losing hold over it.
Of course, time, its incipient rites of passage cannot be arrested. “King Matt the First” is acutely cognisant of this. While we initially watch the two sisters play freely, conjuring colourful imaginary worlds and lives, there’s an aching sense of its evanescence. Change is constant. But how does one move forward through life without wholly drifting far from certain beginnings? The film weaves vulnerability with an open heart. It takes us in with all our cynicism and insecurities.
Lea mourns her sister’s steady, rising lack of interest in frolicking around. She’s almost always immersed in books, disconnecting from the world, exploring it as she once used to. Zoja mentions trying to revive fun and banter with her sister but it no longer holds appeal. They become failed stints, not quite as vibrant and joyous as they once were. Lea nudges her sister how it feels like, the flush of adulthood. She has to experience it for herself, Zoja gently asserts.
As endearing as it is softly elegiac, “King Matt the First” understands erosions exerted by time, adulthood as a stalking, rudely disrupting incursion. With age, gathering responsibilities, the endless anxiety, the hastening pursuit of money, abandonment, and mischief may quietly die out. In the guise of a film, it’s a call to reclaim one’s inner child. To watch the film is to soak in delight, succeeded by a tinge of rueful recognition. “King Matt the First” is a wondrous infusion of magic, laced with pangs of time sweeping in. Shimmeringly pure, it lets us smell the flowers.
