Pornografia (2003)

Director:

Jan Jakub Kolski

Writers:

Luc Bondy (writer)
Gérard Brach (writer)

Release Date:

17 October 2003 (Poland)

Genre:

Drama | Romance | War

Plot:

Witold narrates a story. In Warsaw, in 1943, he meets the cultivated Fryderyk at a salon and they become friends...

Plot Keywords:

Friend | Murder | Youth | Country Estate | Warsaw

Awards:

11 wins & 7 nominations

Cast

Krzysztof Majchrzak	...	Fryderyk
Adam Ferency	...	Witold
Krzysztof Globisz	...	Hipolit
Grazyna Blecka-Kolska	...	Maria, Hipolit's Wife
Grzegorz Damiecki	...	Waclaw Paszkowski
Jan Frycz	...	Siemian
Irena Laskowska	...	Amelia, Waclaw's Mother
Sandra Samos	...	Henia
Anna Baniowska	...	Servant Weronika
Kazimierz Mazur	...	Karol
Jan Urbanski	...	Skuziak, Amelia's Killer
Magdalena Rózczka	...	Sitting Room Landlady
Henryk Niebudek	...	German Soldier Hans
Dariusz Toczek	...	German Soldier
Jerzy Chojnowski	...	Gustaw

Also Known As:

Pornography (International: English title)

Runtime:

USA:117 min

Country:

Poland | France

Language:

Polish

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Filming Locations:

Pierzchaly, Poland

Company:

Canal+ Polska

Spielberg should sue

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.