REWERS
Category: Feature Film
Director: Borys Lankosz
Country: Poland
Year: 2009
Length: 101'
Production Status: completed
Participating Shooting Stars:
Agata Buzek
Trailer
REVERSE
In 1952, during the peak of Stalinist terror in communist Poland, an encounter with the secret police changes life for three generations of women in the good-looking, tonally sophisticated Reverse. Rich with references to Polish culture and cinema history, the genre-juggling feature debut of prize-winning documaker Borys Lankosz is clever, complex and spiked with a special kind of black humor.
Prim 30-year-old spinster Sabina works as a poetry editor in a Warsaw publishing house and shares a crowded apartment with her resourceful mother, Irena, and ailing but alert grandmother. Eager for Sabina to marry, the older women put forward a string of unsuitable candidates. But shy Sabina, whose heart flutters at the manly bare chests of soldiers glimpsed in cinema newsreels, finds her own macho admirer seemingly by chance.
Alissa Simon, Variety
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
REVERSE is hard to classify in terms of specific film genre. It is planned deliberately to portray the patchwork quality of the script. The beginning of the film takes us to the feature world of Stalin's times (the tragedy of the poet who was taking an active part in the Uprising), then we move to the bourgeois comedy with its genuine taste for word play (a visit of the bookkeeper), so that we could next find ourselves in film noir (a murder), which in the third act (getting rid of the body; a visit of party dignitaries) changes into a noir comedy. The variety of genres is the power of this project and proves its originality. The contemporary frame of the story and its ending consolidates the changing film genres into one coherent entirety.
REVERSE is a mind-provoking film, which has the chance (if only for a brief moment) to debunk a tendency to "monumental" reading of the history, clearly existing in our culture. It enables a closer look at "past" with the eyes of ordinary women (which is vital- still an insufficient number of movies about women are being made). REVERSE gives also the thing, that true and tried viewers love best - real fun of the cinema.
