Sydney Film Festival - Polish films

There have been two Polish films shown in this year's film festival - Cold War and Mug. Both awarded. Cold War in Cannes and Mug in Berlin.

                                                                     

I have read and heard a lot about the film Cold War. So much and so positive that I expected a film that is really spellbinding and very moving. Has it been for me like that or am I a little disappointed? Strangely enough I experience both of the reactions. If one expects perfection in anything, disappointment is a consequence of such high expectations. I knew that the film is going to be black and white but I did not expect a small screen, so my first reaction was a surprise that the screen felt so restricting. I was looking at the first scenes from a perspective of a foreigner. Will an Australian understand the meaning of the film. After all, Polish specifics are difficult to comprehend especially by an Australian. I would say that an average Australian will shrug their shoulders and move to more familiar and practical subjects than neurotic feelings of some foreigners. I do not think that the film can gain popularity outside Europe. Too dark in a tender way, too sensitive, the story insufficiently explained and really told by omissions. You have to be tuned in to dark moods of a foreign kind.

I do not think I have enticed anyone to see the film if and when it hits Australian movie theaters, but this is a film one should see at her/his own risk of emotional damage.

One of the scenes I like.

The film is told in an elliptical way starting from 1949 to finish about ten years later. My times of understanding events around me came much later than that, or maybe I was too naïve to understand it at all when I lived in Poland. Still, I understood some on the scenes in the way a non-Pole would have great problems to understand. Some nuances of the film are not accessible to foreigners, in my opinion. Maybe this is just as well as it is so depressing. Thinking about it I feel sorry for the nation. We turned out not that bad considering the times of the war and the years after. I wonder what was more damaging to the soul of the nation, the Nazis’ killing of Poles with a special focus on Polish inteligencia or the Soviet friends reversing the social structure and lifting the uneducated to the top?

The film is a romance without a happy end, there is no happiness as a part of love at all. Maybe glimpses, fleeting moments of elation. It kept my attention completely and the movie theatre was unusually quiet during the film. There is no melodrama in the film, the people meet their destiny and events of their lives resigning to the bleak realities and need to survive politically, economically and emotionally. Until they cannot continue…

It is a good film and from me 10 out of 10.

                                                                   

During the Film Festival of Sydney, I have seen another Polish film – Mug. It has been awarded in the Berlin Film Festival. We, Poles, look for confirmation of our self-worth in signs of international acceptance. Such a small weakness. The film got an international recognition so I should be proud, but watching it I cringed and protested internally against Poland and Poles shown in the film. Bigotry, narrowmindedness, cruelty, drunkenness and acceptance of drunks, rudeness, bad language (I heard bad language in life, but Polish offenses and swearing are of particular quality and power)…It all made me feel ashamed. It was an unpleasant film to watch. It is a comedy and when the audience laughed. I made me think Gogol’s thought “What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourself.” Only that this mainly applied to my compatriots and myself. Why wallow in such self-depreciation? To notice and change? Only that those who notice the problems are not typically the ones who need so much to change.

An unpleasant film to watch, at least for a Pole.  4 out of 10.