Tricks


Matthias Wulff, 21 July 2009

This film about summer holidays in a Polish mining town arouses troublesome emotions. But the film Tricks knows how to deceive: it’s extremely nice, intelligent and undramatic – but there’s no chance of the ending turning out kitsch.

Polish director Andrzej Jakimowski’s latest film Tricks is about a perfect summer, love and being a child. Polish films are not what they once were. A German film-goer is expecting gloomy realism, a touch of mystery and intellectualism: particularly when the film is shot in a mining town. If that’s the kind of expectations you’re bringing to it, Tricks may turn out to be a great disappointment, because it’s so totally different.

It’s about summer and being a child, about love and the search for happiness – a combination which according to all rules of film-making often culminates in a kitsch or silly or lightweight little film. Or sometimes a combination of all three.

Tricks doesn’t comply with any rules. It proves that a nice, cheerful, undramatic film doesn’t automatically have to be lightweight. And that fact – in opposition to Western culture, which only sees meaning in deep suffering and by doing so continues to deceive its audiences – may turn out to be its greatest trick.

The framework for this is not especially complex. Stefek is a fair-haired, bright, quite serious seven-year-old boy. It’s the summer holidays and he’s doing the things he ought to be doing. He wanders along the railway tracks, tries to shoo pigeons from their open cage, plays at Batman with the help of a branch and makes sure his sister Elka doesn’t end up in the arms of the wrong guy.

He’s always on the go, partly in his own world and partly as the observer of adult life. He sees a man on the platform who could be the father he never knew. He has his father’s photograph but it’s scribbled over, full of holes and not really much help. Ineffectively waiting for a disaster to happen.

Stefek watches the man (who irritatingly resembles the former director of SAT 1, Roger Schawinski) day in and day out and wonders whether this man with a briefcase, who loves eyeing up women and flirting with them, could be the man who left his mother.

He watches this supposed father with interest, but impartially, and it’s only when Stefek begins to throw coins onto the tracks, like other people throw them into a well, that the viewer understands that he misses his father.

“Is it possible to bend luck to your will? Stefek asks his sister towards the end of the film and director and screenwriter Andrzej Jakimowski would have chimed in “You can, but you have to really want to”.

Stefek doggedly pursues his goal and can’t be shaken off it, while his sister Elka lacks that last little bit of determination.
She wants to get an unspecified job – using her knowledge of Italian – but small upheavals in her daily life always get in the way. She works in a restaurant with outdoor tables where young people in unfashionable clothes meet and dance under garlands to the strains of outdated music.

Whenever the girl has to return home late at night she’s always warned to be careful. An accident waiting to happen – think the audience. But they’re wrong. Instead they see a world, which – both in film and culture generally – is unfamiliar.

People live here without murders, without malice, noise, without searching for sense or drama. Stefek gambols over the railway tracks and is never run over by a train. A tramp shambles past the sister and brother and doesn’t hassle them. Elka and the car mechanic Jerzy fancy each other, but without claiming the right of ownership, excessive talk or intense passion.
Totally different than in beer or ice-cream ads.

The film has several plotlines and Jakimowski constantly shows which way his film could have gone if he had wanted to describe the story with the typical “disturbingly realistic take” on the disintegration of everyday life. Above all, the elements on show, such as a run-down small town, an overburdened single mother and a neglected young son are perfect ingredients for shooting a kitchen-sink drama.
But Jakimowski does not go for clichés. Allowing life in the film to simple unfold, he chooses the right way.

Jakimowski’s film tells the story of a perfect summer – which looks quite different than beer or ice-cream ads would have us believe. Eyes screwed up against the bright sun, bathing in a stream, bright, never-ending evenings, paddling in flip-flops, riding a motorbike without a helmet, bashful love and things that people reflect on very thoroughly on a cool, autumn day.

A parallel film is running alongside: a flash-back to childhood when the days never ended.
Jakimowski used untrained actors who play without pathos, without imposing themselves. If Elka cries, a few silent tears run down her cheeks. There’s no need to emphasise this with the actor’s face showing a really despairing expression or by allowing the camera to linger too long.
Ewelina Walendziak, playing the role of Elka, looks “ravishing”, in the words of her mother and girlfriends from work.
She’s a Polish Scarlett Johansson, but slimmer, more modest and younger.
The knowledge that pretty faces are important for a film to succeed is very apparent. There’s nothing new about that, of course. But we sometimes forget it.

online :
http://www.welt.de/kultur/article4155458/Ein-perfekter-Sommer-ohne-Tui-und-Langnese.html