Tricks


Daniel Sander

One of the most beautiful films this year was made in Poland. In Tricks, a boy tries to outwit fate and get his father back with his mother.

Polish cinema. On first hearing it doesn’t sound that thrilling. Like German cinema – but even more gloomy. Of course, the stereotype’s unfair, but how many Polish films do we really know? Krzysztof Kieœlowski has been dead a long time and Roman Polański took French citizenship some decades ago.
And if any finds come out of Poland there’s seldom a German distributor who is willing to put their faith in them in the cinema world.
That fact that Andrzej Jakimowski’s Tricks is being released in Germany right now – even with only 40 copies – is in itself pretty remarkable. But it has to be done. Because the film is just too good.

What’s more, the potential for dreary boredom is all there. Seven-year-old Stefek (Damian Ul) lives with his overworked mother and elder sister Elka (Ewelina Walendziak) in a godforsaken little town, where the only thing happening are the trains that occasionally pass through.

While Elka dreams of quitting her job as a dish-washer and about a future in an international corporation, Stefek spends his summer hanging around near the railway station, because he thinks one of the commuters is his father, who left the family before Stefek had a chance to get to know him.
A potentially sad story.
But the director, Jakimowski, never lets the mood become sombre. He presents this gloomy backwater in deep, vivid colours, like the light in Venice at the end of the summer.
A pleasant melancholy hovers in the air and the weight of the burden of everyday life slides into the background. The main characters remain unaffected by this. Almost everyone who appears here are loveable and have warm hearts. There are no villains, people help one another, they like each other, and any trifling mistakes just make them seem more human.

Pragmatic, dreamy, optimistic.
The relationship of brother and sister is the most touching.
Elka, who’s ten years older, looks after her younger brother, listens to what he has to say and takes him around with her – even when she goes to a lake with her boyfriend.
For the small boy, she’s the person he can relate to most. When Elka has a job interview he doesn’t budge from the company car park for hours.
She reveals how fate can be outwitted and how luck can be turned to your own advantage. For example, how people can be persuaded to buy fruit from a stallholder who can’t sell his produce or how to throw a paper bag into a rubbish bin without touching it.

Stefek is delighted. And determines to use tricks like these to lead his “father” back home.
Not everything in the film turns out exactly as it should; there are obstacles and disappointments – just like life.
And once you’ve internalised Stefek’s deep optimism, nothing is so bad after all. The boy has sunshine in his heart.
Tricks tells us how beautiful and simple life can be when you have the right attitude. And it accomplishes this in a more cheerful and carefree manner than any other film of this summer.

40 copies is really not many, so you might have to look around to find a cinema showing it.

But make sure you try! You won’t regret it.

wersja online:
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/0,1518,637593,00.html