‘Apolonia, Apolonia’ Review: Sincere Meditations on Art, Motherhood and Friendship

Lea Glob approaches the subject of her award-winning documentary, Apolonia, Apolonia, with a devout curiosity. Apolonia, a French painter whom the director met in 2009, is a striking figure. She is wide-eyed and brunette with bangs that stop, almost abruptly, in the middle of her forehead. She moves with an arresting ease, commanding rooms like stage actors do theater audiences. In the first scene of the film, shot in 2013, the artist flits about her tiny apartment, preparing for her 26th birthday party. She dismisses dress options like a countess among her attendants and demands attention from her friends in a similarly regal manner. Her smile, a toothy grin outlined by vivid lipstick colors, courts mischief. Her eyes inspire questions. 

Who is Apolonia? Glob’s meditative doc is, initially, desperate to know. The beginning of Apolonia, Apolonia chronicles those years when Glob sheepishly assumed the role of director and the artist her subject. The film offers morsels of personal history that links Glob to Apolonia. The former’s grandfather had a reverence for painting, she says, and would pay her one euro to sit for portraits. “He would tell me that a painting is for eternity,” Glob says in a voiceover narration. “That artists since the dawn of time had painted kings, eternalizing them.” Glob chose the camera instead, a decision one wishes the director had given more space in the film. She follows with Apolonia’s history, interspersing footage culled from the painter’s family archive with more recent videos of  the artist tending to daily life. 

There’s a studied element to the early interviews between Glob and Apolonia, strangers thrust together by a school project and an initially parasocial fascination. The director watches the artist navigate her 20s, a tumultuous decade in which Apolonia tries to salvage her parents’ theater, the Lavoir Moderne Parisien, while working on her own paintings. She wants to be a commercially successful artist, but what are her options in a cultural landscape throttled by parasitic market forces? And what of shaping an existence? Does it include romance? A child? Apolonia’s life comes to represent a host of contemporary quandaries, most of them about the tensions faced by working women artists. 

Glob is familiar with this subject, and it seems part of her attraction to Apolonia comes from how the artist aligns with issues the Danish director has been working through. In the 2015 documentary Olmo & the Seagull, Glob partnered with Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa to create an existential portrait of an actress who finds out she’s pregnant while rehearsing for a new play. A year later, in Venus, Glob collaborated with fellow Dane Mette Carla Albrechtsen to interview dozens of women in Copenhagen about sexuality and desire. That film became a study of intimacy and an environment in which these women could wrestle with questions about sexual expectations and impulses. 

Glob returns to these themes in Apolonia, Apolonia and, in some of the documentary’s most gripping sections, applies them to her own life. The director spends 13 years with Apolonia, a stretch of time that changes her relationship to the artist and the project. As Apolonia and Glob get older, what was once a portrait of an artist becomes a keen reflection on creativity, motherhood and friendship. 

While trying to save her parents’ theater, Apolonia meets Oksana, a Ukrainian artist and a founder of the radical feminist group Femen. She invites Oksana to move into her parents’ theater (where Apolonia also lives) and the two develop a relationship that only the term “soulmate” can accurately describe. Oksana pushes Apolonia to practice and finish her matrilineal painting series, a project the artist embarked on to learn more about her mother’s family and their expulsion from Belarus to Siberia during Stalin’s rule. Apolonia, in turn, helps Oksana through her depressive episodes, encourages her friend to apply to art school and functions as a de facto protective, older sister. 

Glob’s camera mediates the terms on which we understand the two women’s friendship. Their relationship goes in and out of view as Apolonia’s priorities change. After being forced to close the theater she called home for decades, the artist heads to New York and then California to realize her dreams in more traditional markets. In Los Angeles, Apolonia makes a deal with Stefan Simchowitz, an art dealer once referred to by The New York Times as “The Art World’s Patron Satan.” Their arrangement requires her to produce 10 paintings a month, an output that eventually burns out Apolonia and disillusions her to the process of becoming famous. 

After this period, Apolonia, Apolonia takes a more intimate turn. As the painter tries to piece her life back together and find inspiration for her practice, Glob’s own life changes in profound ways. The filmmaker goes through a pregnancy that almost kills her. After waking up from a coma, Glob briefly becomes the subject of her own project. One wishes the director spent more time on this section, which offers moments that build on and clarify her ongoing thematic interests. She and Apolonia, older and more experienced, speak more explicitly about what it means to inhabit a body and how motherhood (Apolonia becomes a stepmother during this time) changes their attitude toward work.

Here, the documentary sheds some of its dutiful impulses, giving itself over to the wear of time passing and a life lived. It also harkens back to a sentiment Glob expressed early in the film. When reflecting on the process of making this documentary she still doesn’t know “whether I captured Apolonia with my camera or Apolonia captured me in her theater.” The artist’s charm is never more apparent than in the final section of Apolonia, Apolonia, in which we hear Glob and Apolonia’s phone conversations. Apolonia is no longer just a subject but a confidant. She has pulled not only Glob but us, too, into her orbit.