Rejs

This one is an absolute must. Full of absurd humour, it provides an excellent insight into Poland of the early 70s. The movie features a group of people gathered on a cruise ship - a picture of the society in a nutshell. Some lines have entered the common Polish language. Most probably, however, it is quite hermetic and barely understandable outside of Poland.

"Rejs", or in its English title "A Trip Down the River", is a very silly movie, that packs lots of funny and absurd moments in its short running time.

The story is basically what the English title says: some people on a trip down the river. And nothing else. Well, you have a couple of people that get into the ship for free and one of them gets in charge of entertainment, culture and art. And then all the people on the ship decide to prepare a party for the captain.

That is basically an excuse for making fun of everything, from Polish movies to brooding intellectuals. There is a very funny moment when one of the characters comments about how bad Polish movies are, in which nothing happens and you can have a character just smoking and looking one side first, then the other, while all the while he is actually doing it, just smoking, looking at one side, then the other, and explaining what he is doing. It is all in the absurd, parody side of humor, all small vignettes. The acting or the direction, as the plot, are just an excuse to try to make people laugh.

Nonetheless, even if it is just a little bit over one hour, it has some empty moments and some stretched ones, where the viewer's attention may wander a little bit.

Actors, director and all other people involved in the making of this film, create, together, a completely realistic simulation of the rise to power of certain fractions within a state, their increasing greed, deposing of opponents, an allegory to many of the realities of 'Communist' rule in Poland. The main character, who eventually takes power of the boat, arrives on it with no tickets, and gains a position by mistake, but is still able to use it to form a kind of politburo, and then a dictatorship.

The film manages to do all this whilst being a hilarious comedy, some of the humour could perhaps be difficult for non-Polish viewers to comprehend. Not that much ACTUALLY goes on on the boat, but what goes on can easily be related to external events, and because of the way it is acted, this is a film that never gets boring, against all odds. If this film had gained widespread international fame and distribution, it would probably gain cult status all over the world, and be treated as one of the best films of all time, as it is in Poland.

A very quick look at the cast of this film shows that Stanislaw Tym - a legend that he is - is not the only professional actor playing in this film. Many of the actors are amateurs, adding a flavor to the atmosphere of the film, but majority of the main characters are played by professionals.

As a Polish person I find this film amusing but was never taken by the hype. It's difficult to say how many people genuinely love the film, and how many feel obliged to say they love it.

Rejs is a very "Czech" Polish film - free thinking, good spirited, weird and wonderful. You can watch it as a political metaphor or a social / philosophical observation of life.

What it does really well is make you feel being captive in an absurd situation. You feel the slowness, the time being taken from you when you wait for another bit of small-ish talk. In real life one can have a suspicion that the person nominally in charge isn't really in charge, and the guy who's pulling the strings is an imposter who wasn't even trying to get all that power. Why is your own inadequacy or persona supposed to be any worse?

This is a very funny film. It stars the great Stanislaw Tym - the only professional actor in an otherwise non-professional cast - as a chancer who cons his way on board a pleasure-boat on a river cruise, and he becomes the ship's entertainments officer. The cruise is used as a vehicle for a satire of communist Poland that manages to be cutting but warm at the same time. The absurdities of life in Poland at the time are wonderfully caught. But much of the humour is also more universal - trivial conversations where people have nothing to say but keep talking anyway, pretentious discourses about poetry and cinema leading to complete misunderstanding, the ridiculousness of spending one's time on "holiday" when the time spent supposedly enjoying oneself starts to resemble the boredom of working life, and so on. Non-Poles like me will miss out on the clever word-play in the script, unless you have a Polish speaker on hand to translate for you (as I did - thank you, MT!). But if you just watch it in translation without such help, it's still very funny anyway. The non-professionals are used wonderfully well - imagine Ken Loach or Pasolini making a really silly, but still pointed, comedy. There are some nice visual homages to Fellini and Tati too - another part of the universal appeal is that I think the film is in places like a Polish Monsieur Hulot's holiday. It is a piece of work that is perfect in its own way, and it's easy to see why it is so beloved in its country of origin. But it is also greatly appealing to foreigners, not least because it shows you very nicely what the essence of Polish humour is.

Although it is ostensibly a weird connection, it would be worthwhile to watch this in conjunction with Richard Lester's "Juggernaut", which is apparently a disaster movie about bombs on board a British liner, but is in fact a satire that uses the background of a cruise to make some pointed observations about contemporary society, in this case Britain in the mid-1970s. And Lester's film has some wonderful moments from Roy Kinnear as the ship's increasingly desperate entertainments officer, the spiritual cousin of Tym's phony art and culture secretary. It makes one realise just how great a metaphor for the human condition a cruise is: every one of us is trapped in a delimited space with a bunch of generally well-meaning idiots. This for me is at the root of Rejs's appeal for anyone at all, whether they are Polish or not.