Most critics have, understandably, read this as an attempt to rework Balthazar, but Skolimowski clarified at the FPFF presser I attended that the project in fact originated out of a desire to make a film centered an animal. At first conceived as a dog, this was rejected as being too kitschy. It was only after Skolimowski and his wife-collaborator Ewa Piaskowska attended a nativity play in Custonaci (where the couple has a winter home) that they became entranced with the…
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An Uneventful Story 1983
The first film I watched since learning of Godard's death by assisted suicide and, for that reason, devastating. Has its flaws: the period detail is blandly museum-like; Holoubek, though compelling in his contemptuousness, doesn't quite seem old enough or weary enough for the lead. And yet, a film about an elderly man of accomplishment who's aged into a state of exasperated exhaustion, assaulted by mediocrity from all sides and prone to pessimistic philosophical musings which he understands to be useless…
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The Wildcat 1921
A seriously unhinged movie. The majority of shots are framed in decorative cut-outs. Everyone looks slightly (or much more than slightly) insane. Pola Negri gives an endlessly GIF-able performance, and I want to go back in time and hang out with her and be her friend. This is usually described as a satire on militarization, but, honestly, it's way too off-the-rails to be constrained by any one meaning. Bandits. Skulls. Wild mustaches. Sex. Proto-psychedelic sets. (The sets are actually like…
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Demon 2015
In order to free themselves from this curse, all Poles have to do is say that terrible things happened in our grandfathers’ or great-grandfathers’ generation and shed a tear over those who were killed. That’s all.
-Jan GrossWhere Aftermath turned Jan Gross's Neighbors--about Polish complicity in the Holocaust and the nation's refusal to own up to its anti-Semitism--into blunt-force drama, Demon takes the same theme and plays it as absurdist horror-comedy. The wedding guests as Polish society: They just…