A still from ‘Chopin Chopin!’.
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
“Put all your soul into it, play the way you feel.” It has been almost 175 years since Frederic Chopin’s soul was snatched away into the ether by tuberculosis at the age of 39. However, the complexity of his personality and the beguiling, bittersweet melancholy of his music, live on.
From Kolkata to Calgary, wherever a child is introduced to piano, the poet of the piano holds his hand through the musical alleys of etudes, preludes, ballads, and mazurkas to reach the final goal: simplicity.
The son of Poland, whose heart still resides in a Warsaw church, has been a subject of numerous cinematic and literary portrayals. This week, the 50th edition of the Polish Film Festival inGdynia opened with a new, pulsating biopic of the virtuoso. Helmed by noted Polish filmmaker Michal Kwiecinski, Chopin Chopin! captures the genius of Chopin in the Romantic Period without submitting to his stature. It seeks to find the scarred soul of the musician whose compositions continue to heal the world.
Starring the young and intense Eryk Kulm in the lead role, the film portrays tuberculosis as the villain of the piece, and his rumbustious association with strong, independent women, as well as how the illness and desire came together to define his music. While Kulm feels he was destined to play the part due to his love for the piano, Kwiecinski, in an exclusive interview with The Hindu, where he discusses the film’s emotional and visual design, says he was the only Polish actor who could play Chopin.
A still from the movie.
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
By discover the enduring legacy of Frederic Chopin through a new biopic, captures the genius and complexity of the Romantic composer
“Earlier depictions of Chopin presented him and his music as ‘slow’ while my research suggests otherwise. He wanted to present Chopin as ‘a rockstar of his times’ whom the society loved. “He was active and spontaneous, a king of society.”
He compares the Parisian society’s struggle with cholera and tuberculosis, to how we took time to figure out COVID. “People didn’t know how to deal with the illness and fell to superstitions and shamans to find a cure. The illness affected his romantic pursuits and created a complex bond between the idea and expression of love that takes a mercurial shape on screen. Chopin, Kwiencinski feels, put the deep emotion of love into his music.
“He transported the emotion into music rather than to the person.” The melancholy finds expression through his visual design as well; sunlight, a potion for a wilting Chopin, becomes a metaphor for hope that shines through his window when it is too late.
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Discussing Chopin’s open relationship with French novelist George Sand, Kwiecinski notes that she sought closeness to the genius but didn’t wish to bind him in a defined relationship. “In her letters to Chopin’s friend, she writes she didn’t mind him with other women as long as he continued to provide her intellectual stimulation.”
Kwiecinski, who has been to India many times, is eager to showcase Chopin Chopin! at the upcoming International Film Festival of India and the Kolkata Film Festival. Chopin Chopin! is set to release in 45 countries in October. The director says that he has a script about a Polish businessman and an Indian worker set in Kolkata and is eager to make it happen.
(The writer is in Poland at the invitation of the Polish Film Festival and the Polish Institute in New Delhi).
Published – September 25, 2025 05:25 pm IST
