Poland in the early 1970s: after visiting his mother and father in the town where he grew up, the young, recently published poet Rafal Wojaczek travels back to his small room in the gloomy city of Wroclaw. He wanders the streets, catches up with his girlfriend Teresa, watches television with his landlady, hangs out at the local café. All the time, he is looking for an opportunity to kill himself…

Rafal Wojaczek is regarded as one of the leading poets of post-war Poland, but this is not your average biopic. Instead, it focuses on a brief period near the end of his life. Though made almost thirty years after his death, the film wears its period trappings very lightly: references to communist rule in Poland are limited to a couple of soldiers, some banners with political slogans that no one pays attention to, and the dire state of the food, much of which has to be imported from Poland’s Soviet Bloc neighbours. The characters share a resigned, ironic view of the world which could be interpreted as a defence against totalitarianism, but may just be characteristically Eastern European.

Films with unremittingly self-destructive protagonists, like LE FEU FOLLET, LEAVING LAS VEGAS and CONTROL, are often a hard slog. Not so here. Indeed, a film focused on its lead character’s death-wish really has no business being this entertaining. Majewski serves the story brilliantly by holding back and refusing to pass judgement. There are few close-ups in the film. Instead, we tend to see the world going on as Wojaczek moves through it. This distance allows an undertone of dark comedy to come through. In particular, the scenes in the café where the local poets congregate, with its terrible shiny-suited band and banal conversations about toilet facilities, are reminiscent of the lugubriously comic films of Aki Kaurismäki.

Majewski repeatedly finds an unexpected beauty in Poland’s crumbling infrastructure

As a corollary to Majewski’s externalised approach, we are given no real insight into the lead character’s mindset. Wojaczek, played by the 22-year-old Krzysztof Siwczyk — a poet in his own right — never attempts to explain himself. At first, he might appear to be merely play-acting, as when he lies in a freshly-dug grave and instructs the grave-digger to bury him — ‘I’m a dead man already’. When his father finds him half-heartedly trying to gas himself, the older man barely reacts, as if to suggest that it is not the first time this has happened. But as the film progresses, it gives an ever stronger sense that Wojaczek feels he has been painted into an existential corner and sees no other way out, despite his growing success as a poet, support from family and friends and a girlfriend who accepts his mood-swings and rather casual attitude to love-making.

Aided by the film’s black and white cinematography, Majewski repeatedly finds an unexpected beauty in Poland’s crumbling infrastructure. His decision to open and close with very similar shots — Wojaczek breaking a restaurant window at start by jumping out of it, then glaziers replacing the glass — adds an elegiac note to this strange, sad but darkly funny tale.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjP5NuVJ-lc