Tonight Kate, Alex, Abi, Jessica and I took a break from the pub scene to check out a Polish film (with English subtitles, of course) called "Rezerwat," or "Preserve." I tried to keep an eye out for differences between Polish and English cinema, the first one I noticed is that there were no previews! (At least not at this theater.) American megaplexes could take a lesson.
Anyway, brief story synopsis: Marcin, a painfully attractive struggling photographer, gets dumped by his supermodel girlfriend for selling a compromising photo of her father to a newspaper. He moves to a gritty tenement in Warsaw, (I'd normally use the term "ghetto," but in this context it seems rather...inappropriate) where he befriends Hanka, a boarderline alcoholic whose frequent fistfights with her deadbeat boyfriend and supposed sexual escapades are constant fodder for neighborhood gossip. The story centers around Marcin's desire to finally catch his big break with a photography series about the tenement and its inhabitants. Along the way, he gains a deeper understanding of the people, and himself, and ultimately decides to forgo the life of an artiste to run a small photography shop, nurture the career of young Grzesiek, a trouble-making preteen with undeniable talent. And of course, live happily ever after with Hanka.
On a more serious note, the film certainly showcased a different side of Poland: poor, dirty, hopeless, riddled with social problems like rampant alcoholism and domestic violence. The part where they don't send the American students studying abroad. It occurred to me that no matter where you are in the world, the conditions for poverty and its ramifications are strikingly similar. After the film there was one line I couldn't get out of my head. Marcin finds Hanka with a bloody nose and a black eye following another fight with her boyfriend. When he threatens to call the police, she replies, "What kind of man are you if you can't smack your women around a bit?" She said it in a way that suggested she was trying to lighten the mood, but it struck me that the basic ideas about gender that we take for granted, whose particularities we debate from the comfort of a classroom, still have so far to penetrate before they can be called universal.
