After the more inspiring opening film Still Life, Saturday at Warsaw Film Festival was the first day of the routine - main programs, comeptitive or not, start to unfold, ten days of searching for real gems amid more than a hundred entries are ahead. But, unfortunately, the three films I caught on Saturday were all more or less mediocre - which is probably the most unfavorable definition for a movie.
Love Buidling (dir. Iulia Rugina) is rather hackneyed screwball comedy from Romania set in a countryside summer camp for couples in troubled relationships. The plot, although sometimes a bit hard to follow, is well-knit, but it's no use to retell it here - Love Building works best as a sitcom bonding on comical quality of separate episodes and the charisma of certain actors. The movie is in all ways determined by its background - conceived and realized as a graduation film of a summer acting school, Love Building is deprived of any ambition, very amateurish at times, and, essentially, looks like a cheesy TV material. Indeed, it's crowd-pleasing and all, but sometimes you just wonder if any Romanian film would be selected for an international festival these days, based on its country of origin alone.
The International Competition opened with the Lithuanian entry The Gambler (dir. Ignas Jonynas). The story of a gambling-addicted paramedic Vincentas who makes books on his patients' death to earn some money, is obviously influenced by the work of Martin Scorsese, especially the underappreciated Bringing Up The Dead, where another wacky paramedic was played by Nicolas Cage. However, despite the Scorsese-esque tracking shots, idiosyncratic framing, eerie pulsating soundtrack by Paulius Kilbauskas and Domas Strupinskas, and rigid appeal of Vytautas Kaniušonis who plays the lead part, Jonynas in his first feature film can't help but adhere to some massive clichés of social realism, handheld camera and brutal violence included; at some point the events and actions become very predictable in their morbidness, not unlike in Alejandro González Iñárritu's everything-will-be-very-bad dramaturgy. That being said, The Gambler was the best of the three yesterday's films.
The long tradition of kitchen sink realism is the main reference point for Thirst, the Russian entry to the International Competition, directed by another debutant Dmitriy Tyurin. Although the scriptwriter Andrei Gelasimov turns the venerable chernukha genre (exploitation cinema about poverty and crime) into some kind of a fairy tale - the protagonist Kostya is an alcoholic veteran of the Chechen war who hides his heavily burnt face under a hood and tells his neghbor's kid a story of his life to get him to sleep. The movie alternates between a succession of episodes set at grim, poverty-stricken locations (the richly decorated apartment of Kostya's father, the hypocritical politician, provides the contrast), and flashbacks, shot and designed in a subjective, more whimsical fashion corresponding to Kostya's artistic imagination; however, the story lacks real development, and the ending feels unmotivated.
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