11 Minutes
Veteran Polish director Jerzy Skolimovski delivers a dazzling multi-strand thriller concerned with chance and chaos
Jerzy Skolimovski's latest is a fractured puzzle movie in which several characters collide in dizzyingly constructed vignettes of cosmic timing. The episodes in themselves are not particularly remarkable: it’s the skill with which the 77-year-old Polish auteur stitches them together that really impresses. We’re introduced to an actress being pushed towards the casting couch by a sleazy Hollywood director; a hotdog vendor with a dark past; a drug courier who’s making cuckolds out of his powerful clients; a young lad who’s preparing to commit a crime. We also follow a German Shepard, seeing the world from his canine point of view.
These slight sketches – some whimsical, some brooding – create a vivid tapestry of modern-day Warsaw, the city providing a backdrop of sleek lines in steel and glass. The film opens with a collage of the characters we’re about to follow shown in a myriad of digital imagery: homemade porn films, CCTV, webcam confessionals. This implicit suggestion that we’re all under digital scrutiny is made explicit midway through the film as a city surveillance operator with a glitching monitor is introduced. As the film builds to its operatic finish, each character converges around the same corner of town and we’re left with the realisation that in our overly-surveyed world, all of us, sinners and saints, are subject to chance and chaos. The theme is nihilistic but the execution is thrilling. [Jamie Dunn]
18 Feb, CCA Theatre, 8.45pm
19 Feb, CCA Theatre, 1.15pm