There are two film communities that carry special expectations for me. One of them is Polish film. Its probably not fair, but Kieslowski and Polanksi seem to be more than film geniuses. They seem to reflect a certain manifest spirit of the people that is coherent and close to the surface. One gets the illusion that Poland is a place where ordinary motions and lives are easily revealed as lovely, wound with an attractive, unornamented motion.

So any Polish film comes to me with the expectation that it will be special. I have just the opposite expectation for Czech and Hungarian films for instance. I expect them to simply struggle.

This is a film that let me down for the only reason that it is Polish. If you do not know it, there are events that don't quite matter. The thing is a sort of meditation on the perfection of placement within flows of hopelessness. Its all about grace in motion, and does some superb work in conveying the story cinematically. For instance, there are many high overhead shots of our two junkpickers moving gracefully, usually through dank urban residue. These are complemented by similar drifting shots from the side, many with portals and revealing planes.

So the man with the eye surely know what he was doing; and he is successful in giving us pure visual language that gets to the heart of the thing. Its not nuanced, woven in any way, so after a bit you wonder if this is all: a canvas with no paint. So its the guy with the pen that seems to have decided that a simple tone is good enough. So what you end up with is something not worthy of Poland, an art film that can serve as a date movie is your date isn't deep enough to be interesting.

There are some story knots: the ex-girlfriend and his brother; the tales of a past untold; the small laughs about junk. But it could have been a film that mattered.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.