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Saturday, 01 May 2010 23:57

Polish Film Festival Part 2 / My Flesh My Blood / Zero

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my flesh my bloodLast night at the Regency South Coast Village Theater the Polish Film Fesitval played two stunning films, neither of which is easy to categorize.  Sometimes that can be bad but in the case of "My Flesh, My Blood" and "Zero" that is most definitely good.

Imagine the anguish and pathos of  "The Wrestler" and the dangerous, raw anger of "Raging Bull" but dialed up and amped times ten.

"My Flesh, My Blood" is a story about a pro middleweight boxer facing the end of his career and the end of his life from too many blows to the head.  Unable to articulate his pain through anything but hard sex and violence, the character of Igor (Eryk Lubos) isn't capable of accepting either fate gracefully.  He plows into and through things and his life (nicely symbolized by his love of punk clubs and slam dancing) searching for a way to make it make sense again.

Enter Yen Ha (newcomer Luu De Ly in her film debut) who is simply trying to copemy flesh my blood with life as an immingrant in Poland.  Wanting only to fit in, learn the language and become a citizen, she hardly seems capable of bringing Igor some measure of peace.  But she does.  Slowly, inch by painful inch.

Igor presents her with a proposition:  become my wife, bear my child and you will gain instant citizenship and everything I own will be yours when I die.  Yen Ha accepts but has no idea where that acceptance will ultimately take her.

Igor as played by Lubos is a raw wound being constantly rubbed by the sandpaper of life's paths.  His self-destructive ways thwart what he hopes is his attempt to reconcile his previous bad behavior and leave this planet with a legacy beyond his fighting.  He is impossible to turn away from and incredibly hard to watch.  Yen Ha is a small bobber in Igor's angry seas, lashed by his pain like a hurricane slaming into a small coastal area.  She is battered but never quite broken.  Luu De Ly's quiet and nuanced performance make what sometimes seems as arbitrary plot decisions work.

my flesh my blood I felt like this was 2/3rds of a fantastic film.  At a point, the narrative takes a strange and unsatisfying turn and the ending just spins around and around like a lost dog searching for its home.  I understood the logic in the turn but I didn't agree with it.  The effect was to greatly diminish the strong, dramatic storyline by creating another set of character arcs that hadn't been around up to this point and felt inserted.

I dearly wish the promise of the first, enticing minutes was played out all through the entire film because both Eryk Lubos abd Luu De Ly - who was absolutely stunning in her film debut - create a world that is terribly painful and awkward but also instantly compelling.  There is a small measure of hope in every moment the two of them are together - amazing considering how ill-equipped either character is to deal with their lives.

See "My Life, My Blood" if just for the strength of the characters and the performances by the two main actors. But if you can't take your drama real and raw I'd pass on it entirely because this film will definitely affect you.

"My Flesh, My Blood" is directed by  Marcin Wrona with a screenplay by Wrona, Grazyna Trela and Marek Pruchniewski
 

zeroThe movie following was "Zero."  This is a film that throws all feature film narrative conventions out of the window - to really good effect.  Overlong at two+ hours, it begins several different story lines that interweave constantly in interesting ways.  It reminded me a bit of the way that soap opera stories are told except for the fact that the transitions and dovetailed stories were so clever and compelling that they surpassed by light years anything similar.

There is no real point to telling you even one complete storyline because they were all fun and interesting - up to a point - with director/writer Pawel Borowski squeezing all the latent potential out of all of them.

But the star of the film was the way it was told - intertwining stories that began, transitioned and increased in intensity and then finally ended for better or for worse.

For instance:  a phone call for a takeout sandwich to a shop for an office character becomes a cake chosen by another character in the shop as the order is phoned in.  That character, a middle-aged female doctor, takes the cake home to give with tea to her young male prostitute.  A knock on the door just as she's getting ready to hook up with the male prostitute (who we see later with his girlfriend) is a door-to-door salesman selling little funny puppets that she doesn't want.  The puppetzero seller (another story himself) goes to a lonely young girl next door who sadly says that she doesn't have any children to give the puppets to.  She then listens through the walls to the middle-aged female doctor moaning in ecstacy which pushes her to flee outside to a park where she then runs into a grandmother walking her grandson who gives her some walnuts.  The grandmother and son belong to a different character who we've seen having an affair with...and on and on.  The entire movie was done that way.

I lost count of the stories being told.  Some of them resolved suddenly and powerfully, some just whimpered to conclusions.  The only thing that escaped me was the very last moment where the phone was ringing in this exec's office.  I couldn't remember if the film had featured that as part of the opening or not and lost that ending thread.  It was hard simultaenously reading the subtitles, taking notes in the dark about the movie, and shushing the bleating idiots across the theater who were talking - they finally shut up but I had missed some parts of the story as I glared and shushed at them.  In a story this complicated, that's not good.

I could only stay for the Q&A with the director for a few minutes but he said he got the idea sitting at a coffee shop in a large city in Poland and watching people come and go.

"Zero" was fun and well executed.  If it had just been 10-15 minutes shorter it would have been that much better. 

The Polish Film Festival continues today (Sunday, May 2,2010) at the Regency South Coast Village Theater  INFO HERE

Read 1539 times Last modified on Wednesday, 05 August 2015 16:14
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Mark Sevi

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