What on earth could have possessed the NY Film Festival selection committee to inflict this pretentious, boring, derivative, ugly and silly piece of third-rate filmmaking on its audience? Because it's Polish and we haven't had a lot of worthwhile Polish movies since Kieslowski? Has it come to that?
The film takes Witold Gombrowicz's long-winded but intermittently fascinating classic novel and superimposes a gratuitous (and fatuous) Spielbergesque holocaust plot line, to make it all, I guess, more compelling. The effect is glaringly contrived and (as with the far better Spielberg original) offensively trivializing.
In case anyone misses the point, the holocaust plot overlay involves a doomed little girl and, at the dénouement, a shift to a black-and-white background against which is displayed, in color, a talismanic link to her. Sound familiar? Spielberg should sue.
The sad thing is that there is some talent at work here. Though the plot is gratuitously confusing, meandering, and contrived, the use of a country house around which a low-intensity conflict between Germans and Polish partisans swirls obliquely is effective, with the fighting intruding suddenly into and then just as suddenly vanishing from the playing out of the protagonists' humdrum idleness and self-absorption. Grayzna Blecka-Kolska gives a performance that almost transcends the clichés written into her role as the quietly tipsy châtelaine, and the two young people who are the objects of the middle-aged protagonists' dirty-old-man obsessions (Gombrowicz's central plot line, if no longer Kolski's) look as if they might have been far more effectively used in some other movie, one in which they were given something to do beyond standing around and looking beautiful (which they are, it should be said). But on the whole, this is an over-the-top, pretentious dud, the sort of thing that should be seen only by the paid critics who then have a professional obligation and civic duty to spare all the rest of us such an irritating waste of our time.
