SUKIENKA (THE DRESS) + Q&A WITH THE MAKERS
Watchable. The Polish actors' short film nominated for this year's Academy Awards is a realistic yet extraordinary story. While normally I'm put off by the Polish tendency to shoot dramas about disabilities, the country's film-makers have become kind of experts in the field. Dwarfs' sex is not a common topic, to say the least. Actually I've never seen it tackled by the cinema before. The aggression and the man's dubious motivation for the intercourse are striking. On the other hand, women supporting each other put the incident in a wider perspective, where it's male domination set against women's solidarity. The ending is ambiguous - has she just been replaced or is she seeing herself were she bigger? It's an impressive film but no Oscar quality in my opinion. It's all somehow mediocre: the story, the setting, the acting and technicalities.
Seen online. The dialogues were not always audible, in spite of great quality of the online version, with decent volume, some lines were just murmured so incomprehensibly I had to resort to subtitles. Funnily enough, I was reading the English translation in order to understand Polish dialogues. Cinematic reception might differ.
Scriptwriter/director Tadeusz Łysiak says he likes feminine cinema. He believes in 'losowość'.("randomness, stochasticity"). He may be right. The ending is different than planned. Due to a lack of light there's no scene of her walking through the parking lot where she sees her elongated shadow. He admits the existing ending can be interpreted in various ways. What mattered to him was for the film to be about feminism, exclusion and to be plausible. Gaming machines are illegal in Poland so it was hard to get a permit to shoot it. Many leading Polish actors refused to take the role of the man. First the producers were looking for an actor with a brutal look. The cinematographer wanted not to show the female protagonist's short height - from what I could see he failed miserably. As some point they are sitting at the same height as they're talking equal to equal. The scene was ad-libbed in a large part since the scripted dialogue sounded fake. In practice, first there was long silence, then they improvised the small talk. Just a few original sentences remained. Dorota Pomykała ad-libbed in the laundry scene too - she'd act anything as long as the camera was rolling. Anna Dzieduszycka, the dwarf actress, has had no acting school but 10 years of practice. The director's love acted the neighbour on the balcony. The film was available free on YouTube in the period preceding the nominations. Only two Oscar-shortlisted films used this sort of promotion - the other one was "The Long Goodbye".
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