The real culprits of the Polish Film Festival: An abridged preview

Seeing an entire festival of another nation's films plunges the viewer into a new realm of conflicts and catalysts. The contemporary selections of this week's Polish Film Festival (running Friday through Sunday at Vilas Hall) ask us to empathize with characters who live in a geopolitical, ethnic, and social reality that few of us can claim to share. Invaded by Nazis, then absorbed into the Eastern Bloc, then pushed into the free-market '90s and eventually the European Union, Poland gives this modest, five-title festival a hell of a lot of history to grapple with. Still, a complicated historical context by itself can't provide all the friction a good film narrative needs. Though the three films The A.V. Club was able to view varied greatly in quality, each drops a doozie into an already tangled situation. Here's a brief look at what's really driving the characters in each film crazy.

Y2K
Incredibly, a film made in 2008, Juliusz Machulski's How Much Does The Trojan Horse Weigh? (Friday, 7:30 p.m.), trifles with the crises the world anticipated as New Year's Eve 1999 approached. Amid vague talk about "computers going crazy," Zosia (Ilona Ostrowska) celebrates the impending arrival of 2000 with her second husband (Maciej Marczewski) and her daughter from a previous marriage, all while wishing that she'd met her current man much earlier in life. She's suddenly and arbitrarily time-warped back to the Soviet '80s and wakes up with her cheating oaf of a first husband (Robert Wieckiewicz), touching off a distressingly graceless collision of sci-fi and romantic comedy. What gets Ostrowska (and The A.V. Club, frankly) through the ordeal is the counsel of her still-alive-in-the-past grandmother, a character which Danuta Szaflarska plays with a lovely balance of kindness and Commie-era dark humor: "If the Soviet Union had the Sahara, sand would be in short supply," she winks during one scene.
Polish souvenir: Back in time, Ostrowska and her pals go looking for love at what the subtitles label an "enamored ball," which appears to be an old-timey Socialist ancestor to speed dating.

Speed
Like Dorota Maslowska's novel of the same title, Xawery Zulawski's adaptation Snow White And The Russian Red (Friday, 9:30 p.m.) dares to crash the planes of fantasy and reality together at ever-varying angles. At times the only handle to grab on to is the knowledge that the rampaging young pissbag protagonist (Borys Szyc) and his pals fuck around with a lot of speed. There's a vaguely stated "war" going on between Poles and Russians in this present-day urban vice-land, yet that doesn't presume to explain how at times Szyc can angrily hurl people across rooms and fields, argue with a new female companion about eggs and join her in a spontaneous musical number before watching her throw up rocks into the bathtub, and generally be so high-maintenance despite being a tough, hedonistic nihilist. Every inter-character relationship in this movie seems to be in a constant state of breakdown, and the film's restless—well, more like compulsive—experimentalism admittedly keeps the madness whirring at a high pitch until the end. And, as you'll suspect from early on, there are stranger forces at work here than just crank.
Polish souvenir: This won't be the first foreign film to broadside prudish American eyes with a shot of an erect penis. But it may be the first to shoot the penis from inside a dude's pants, as Szyc holds his waistband open, looking down at his wang and talking to it.

Attractive Russians
Waldemar Krzystek's Little Moscow (Saturday, 7:30 p.m.) makes a classic case for why filmmakers return so often to military life. In fact and in fiction, it's hard to find a situation that so tightly cuffs together the historical and the personal. As a Russian officer (Dmitri Ulyanov) and his young wife (Svetlana Khodchenkova) settle into a new military post in the Polish city of Legnica (nicknamed "Little Moscow" for its heavy Red Army presence) during the late '60s, she begins an uneasy affair with a handsome Polish officer (Leslaw Zurek). The subtext here is not just that Khodchenkova is the envy of the base; it's that the "friendship" policy between Poles and Russians was riddled with intrigue and suspicion. Sometimes Krzystek forces grim moments instead of just letting them develop, but all in all, this is the Polish Film Fest selection for those who prefer well-rounded, affecting historical dramas.
Polish souvenir: Khodchenkova sums up the central tension of the movie at one crucial turning point, telling a Russian higher-up: "They have such a nice saying here: 'One may have to for Russia, but in Poland, we do as we please.'"