Summary:
What happens to immigrants who, thanks to their appearance, seek to blend in with their adopted countries? This Polish-Dutch film offers us a look at these particular cases.
Review:
Michael (Jakub Gierszal) is a young Polish lawyer who works in an expensive Berlin law firm alongside his boss and friend Franz (Christian Löber). An unexpected meeting with his father, whom he considered dead (Andrzej Chyra) and recently arrived from Poland, will produce a crisis in him.
Michael is tall, blond, with all the looks of a German. He has a very good time, he feels totally integrated into Berlin life and is very concerned about looking German and hiding his Polish origin from him. He is elegant and cold like the wonderful black and white photograph of Lennert Hillege in which the movie is shot. It is not by chance that the film begins with Michael sitting in a room in front of an African poet and potential client who requests to live in Germany, since the studio where he works sponsors immigrants for free. This immigrant, his reappeared father, whom he lodges in his house for a time in an attempt to get to know each other and Franz, constitute a game of mirrors that put his identity and a past and an origin in crisis that the protagonist wants to leave permanently behind after its new German facade.
Urszula Antoniak's film will give us only some clues to that reunion and the motivations of that son and that father who emerged from nowhere. Jakub Gierszal performs a magnetic performance, endowing his character with nuances that go beyond his initial cold restraint. Perhaps some of Michael's behaviors do not feel entirely justified, but they are respectable decisions of the script, in a film that soberly interrogates us about competing identities and the particular case of immigrants who, thanks to their appearance, seek to blend in with the natives of your country of adoption.
