LALKA (Marciej Kawalski) is another of those films I went to see because it’s sub-titled, this one yesterday afternoon, and with less satisfying results. It’s ostensibly the most expensive film ever made in Poland (15 million euros) but still looked rather low-end to me, with not very many extras, battle sequences shot in close-up, thin backgrounds one associates with CGI, and a conventional style of filming that eschewed symbolism and sub-text in favour of basic visual story-telling that highlighted key story elements in what is clearly a saga. It’s the story of a man who works his way up from poverty to become a rich merchant and his attempts to win over a beautiful young aristocrat; a panorama and critique of a society that excluded work, skill and intelligence, based on the 19th-century novel of the same name by Boleslaw Prus, which is considered to be one of, if not the best, novels in the Polish language. I liked the story but not its telling. Interestingly, there is a Netflix series that has recently come out based on the same novel which I will look at to see if they’ve done a better job with the material. Friends working on issues of adaptations may well find rich material to work with here. It’s a long film (2h42 mins) with great actors (Marcin Dorocinski is the lead) and though I wasn’t dazzled I was engaged and appreciated the exposure to this aspect of Polish culture, which was new to me.
José Arroyo
