Kinoblog

Saviour’s Square
Plac Zbawiciela
2006, colour, 105 mins

• Directors: Joanna Kos-Krauze, Krzysztof Krauze
• Producer: Juliusz Machulski
• Script: Joanna Kos-Krauze, Krzysztof Krauze, with additional dialogue by Arkadiusz Janiczek, Jowita Miondlikowska, Ewa Wencel
• Camera: Wojciech Staroń
• Editing: Krzysztof Szpetmański
• Production Design: Monika Sajko-Gradowska
• Costume Design: Dorota Roqueplo
• Cast: Jowita Budnik (Beata); Arkadiusz Janiczek (Bartek); Ewa Wencel (Teresa); Dawid Gudejko (Dawid); Natan Gudejko (Adrian); Beata Fudalej (Edyta); Małgorzata Rudzka (Ola); Zina Kerste (Hania)

The latest film by Krzysztof Krauze (this time sharing writing and directing credits with his wife Joanna Kos) returns to the territory of his breakthrough The Debt in its chilling portrait of how external economic forces can devastate the lives of ordinary people – though here there are no gangsters or melodramatic threats, merely the day-to-day problems of people whose life is unexpectedly turned upside down by a single event.

Bartek (Arkadiusz Janiczek) and Beata (Jowita Budnik) have just sold their flat and have temporarily moved in with Bartek’s mother Teresa (along with their young sons David and Adrian) prior to starting a new life in a much more child-friendly area. But the company developing their new flat goes bankrupt, wiping out their savings, and if things weren’t already tense due to the fact that Teresa (Ewa Wencel) has also lost a substantial sum in the disaster, they’re exacerbated by the fact that she’s never got on with her daughter-in-law and they find life together quite unbearable. And that’s before Beata discovers Bartek’s secret…

With the aid of flawless performances, Kos and Krauze deftly sketch the family’s newly pressurised lives, as well as offering vivid glimpses of life in contemporary Poland. The three leading actors are also credited as co-writers, resulting from the directors’ decision to develop the script through improvisation workshops in a fashion inspired by Mike Leigh, and those familiar with Leigh’s own dysfunctional families, especially in Meantime (1984) and Life is Sweet (1990), will find much to recognise here. Kos and Krauze are highly sensitive towards their characters’ social class: Beata comes from a rural background where everyone looks out for each other, and is helplessly out of her depth when it comes to the pressures of city life.

Her eventual breakdown is foreshadowed by the film’s opening sequence, which jumps forward in time to hint at a dreadful tragedy but offers few concrete details. The Debt did something similar, and it’s a technique that deliberately casts a pall over the entire film, tainting even the early scenes of wide-eyed optimism about the future. The title comes from the address of Teresa’s flat, the square dominated by a statue of Christ. His hands are presumably conferring spiritual benediction on those that live there, but that turns out to be scant comfort in this aggressively secular age.

Links

• Official website (in Polish and English)
• IMDB entry
• Variety  review (Eddie Cockrell)
• Culture.pl’s entry on Krzysztof Krauze (in English) was published before Saviour’s Square was made, but provides valuable contextual material.

The Debt
Dług
1999, colour, 102 mins

• Director: Krzysztof Krauze
• Producer: Juliusz Machulski
• Script: Krzysztof Krauze, Jerzy Morawski
• Camera: Bartosz Prokopowicz
• Editing: Krzysztof Szpetmański
• Design: Magdalena Dipont
• Music: Michał Urbaniak
• Cast: Robert Gonera (Adam Borecki); Jacek Borcuch (Stefan Kowalczyk); Andrzej Chyra (Gerard Nowak); Cezary Kosiński (Tadeusz Frei); Joanna Szurmiej (Basia); Agnieszka Warchulska (Jola); Przemysław Modliszewski (Gerard’s assistant); Krzysztof Gordon (Adam’s father); Sławomira Łozińska (Adam’s mother); Maria Robaszkiewicz (Basia’s mother); Edyta Bach (Joanna); Jakub Bach (Jurek); Joanna Kurowska (Ania); Jerzy Gudejko (doctor); Henryk Gołębiewski (builder); Katarzyna Tatarak (police officer)

I’ve been asked to write a short piece on the Polish director Krzysztof Krauze for the London Film Festival website (his latest film Saviour’s Square/Plac Zbawiciela is screening there on October 24 and 27), so I caught up with his 1999 breakthrough film The Debt. I knew absolutely nothing about it in advance other than what I could glean from the DVD artwork, a montage of black-and-white images of an axe, a gun, a rope, some dollar bills and a police mugshot. So it clearly wasn’t going to have much in common with My Nikifor (Mój Nikifor, 2004), the gentle study of a naive painter that’s the only other Krauze film I’ve seen to date.

Indeed not - although the beginning is leisurely enough, as we meet twentysomething business partners Adam Borecki (Robert Gonera) and Stefan Kowalczyk (Jacek Borcuch) and get an insight into their family lives, once they get involved with Gerard Nowak (Andrzej Chyra) things get much faster, tougher and nastier. Gerard seems friendly enough at first, offering to act as a business go-between. The deal fails to come off, so Adam and Stefan thank him for his time and assume that’s the end of it. But Gerard claims to have expenses, and would quite like to get them repaid…

…and that’s all I’m going to reveal about the plot, as this is the kind of film where the less you know in advance, the better. Suffice it to say that Gerard knows some exceptionally unpleasant people and his interest rate of $1,000 a day is slightly in excess of that charged by most lenders, and you’ll see why Adam and Stefan’s professional and personal lives are turned upside down - but what can they do, in the absence of any evidence?

The Debt is a real palm-sweater for the most part, brilliantly capturing that helpless drowning-in-quicksand feeling of being unable to cope with runaway debts while simultaneously trying to conceal them from relations and loved ones. I didn’t know that it was based on a true story until the closing credits, though the situation works so well as a metaphor for Poland in the chaotic atmosphere immediately following the end of Communism that this scarcely matters. There’s also a strong hint of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment in Adam and Stefan’s psychological torment, especially in the final scenes.

I watched it courtesy of ITI Home Video’s Polish DVD, which was perfectly serviceable. The film itself is presented in what I assume is the correct widescreen aspect ratio - it’s non-anamorphic, but the picture is otherwise quite acceptable. The sound has a couple of glitches (unfortunately, there’s something about the main theme of Michał Urbaniak’s score that triggers a slight pulsing that sounds like an encoding error), but it’s not a serious issue. The subtitles are excellent: clear, idiomatic and properly synchronised, and I don’t recall any problems. Extras are Polish-only, but consist purely of the trailer, very brief biographies/filmographies and a list of awards won by the film.

Links

• Official website (in Polish only)
• IMDB entry
• Longer reviews courtesy of Central Europe Review (Wojtek Kość), Kinokultura (Michael Stevenson), Strictly Film School (Acquarello)
• Ewa Mazierska’s essay ‘Cinema of Hard Times: Individuals, Families and Society in Polish Contemporary Films’ (Canadian Slavonic Papers, Sep-Dec 2004) uses The Debt as one of her key examples.
• Article in The Warsaw Voice from 14 November 1999 that discusses The Debt in the context of late-1990s Polish cinema in general.
• Culture.pl’s entry on Krzysztof Krauze (in English) sets The Debt in the context of the rest of his career

I’m reviewing Krzysztof Krauze’s My Nikifor (Mój Nikifor, 2004) in much more detail for Sight & Sound, but here’s a précis: a quiet, understated, rather moving film about an elderly tramp (or so he initially seems) who installs himself in the studio of artist Marian Włosiński (Roman Gancarczyk) and produces tiny paintings on card at a furious rate. Włosiński’s boss Nowak (Jerzy Gudejko), a cultural functionary, recognises him as the naïve painter Nikifor and insists that he stay, as the government has a policy of promoting folk, or peasant, art. And as Nikifor stays, Włosiński gradually realises that he has a natural talent that his academy training can never hope to match.

In more melodramatic hands, this could have turned into an Amadeus remake, with Włosiński in the jealous Salieri role, but in fact director Krzysztof Krauze and his screenwriter wife Joanna Kos stick strictly to the known facts, which are that Włosiński more or less gave up his career to look after Nikifor and ensure he had a decent working environment - no mean feat when one considers that Nikifor is both verbally and physically unsavoury, even to the point of posing a health risk for Włosiński and his family.

I watched it twice, the first time with literally no advance knowledge (I didn’t even know that Nikifor was played by a woman, the veteran actress Krystyna Feldman, who does a remarkable job), the second time after doing some background research into Nikifor’s real-life career, and enjoyed it much more as a result. I suspect Krauze’s Polish target audience would have been similarly well-informed, as Nikifor seems to be as famous there as the Douanier Rousseau (a close equivalent) is in France.