I’ve just watched two Polish films from 2003 back to back. The first, The Body (Ciało), was the first film by the directing duo of Tomasz Konecki and Andrzej Saramonowicz, whose follow-up Testosterone (Testosteron, 2007) I watched last week. In general, the earlier film is superior: much tighter at 94 minutes, funnier and better structured, though still hopelessly indebted to Quentin Tarantino – here, the narrative broken up into out-of-sequence stories is a direct lift from Pulp Fiction, and in case that wasn’t obvious they also throw in a truly shameless scene in which two criminals pass the time by (over-)analysing ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’. But there’s a lot else to enjoy here in this tale of a corpse that keeps popping up where it’s least expected (or wanted) thanks to a series of farcical misunderstandings involving Siamese twins (protected from the law by virtue of the fact that only one is a criminal), a schoolgirl assassin and a police sergeant obsessed with varieties of pasta. The DVD is on the SPI International Polska label, and is fine, offering a good anamorphic transfer with idiomatic English subtitles. Extras are in Polish.
The other film was Symmetry (Symetria), the directing debut of Konrad Niewolski, most of which is set in a six-man remand cell whose inhabitants are awaiting the outcome of their trial. In the case of twentysomething Łukasz (Arkadiusz Detmer), he firmly believes he will be acquitted on the grounds of mistaken identity, but he took a fellow inmate’s advice to get banged up with hardcore career criminals on the grounds that there’s more genuine honour amongst them than elsewhere in the prison. Little in the film is especially groundbreaking (it’s part of a long line that includes Scum, The Shawshank Redemption, Escape From Alcatraz, and many others) but Niewolski’s cool, controlled staging and excellent performances keep it watchable to the final scene, whose inevitability doesn’t make it any less tragic. This DVD is also on SPI International Polska, though the transfer this time is non-anamorphic (but otherwise fine). I also felt a bit short-changed by the subtitles – they do a fine job of rendering convincing-looking prison slang, but there were several passages where I felt I was only given a précis rather than a full translation.