Witold

What a waste of so many outstanding actresses! We have seen them in other movies and we know that each of them can do much better. The director is incompetent, but the script even worse. The rule says one has to write at least 5 lines of text. However, how can one comment on emptiness?

I was quite surprised how low is the average evaluation of this film & also that nobody reviewed it before. This is a very nice film & strikingly original. I have seen shopping centers in as diverse places as Lviv, Rio de Janeiro (3 of them), Bangkok and Rouen, not to mention Denton, Texas. I have never seen before a film such that the action takes place almost exclusively in a shopping center. In ancient Greece there was the requirement of unity of the time (short time) and place (one place) in theater plays. In modern theaters and films this is considered a hampering limitation. The script author and the director of this film have turned the limitation to an advantage! The texts such as "Day 2" increase the suspense.

Nonna Grishaeva plays the main female role of Ira, a girl who ostensibly is at the bottom of the shopping center hierarchy, putting bar codes on packages and even sweeping a floor. She is cheerful, friendly to everybody & helpful to other shopping center employees, winning them over quickly. She soon has her designs on Vadim ... We find from Nonna Grishaeva's biography that she was born is Odesa and is now a very successful theater actress in Moscow, apart from playing in Russian films. This is clearly a loss to the Ukrainian theater and to Ukrainian film making.

Pyotr Fyodorov plays Vadim, doing also an outstanding job. Like Ira, Vadim is cheerful, friendly and helpful, but with a complicated past. He lives in the shopping center and ventures outside only in a dire emergency; only in a second part of the film we are briefly told why. In his private life he is very thoughtful, actually excessively careful. Trying to win him, Ira has to be very thoughtful herself - which fits her real nature not only the role she has assumed in the shopping center - as well as really soft as far as Vadim is concerned.

Other actors play quite well too. The real names of the actors are not connected to their roles, so here are some names of the roles: the actor playing Vova; the actress playing Lisa who quickly becomes a real friend of Ira & who is great in the scene "let Lisa out"; the actress playing Grandma Nina who actually is Vadim's grandmother by courtesy only; the actor playing Vitaly, a nasty character who in the beginning of the film as the shopping center manager cries "I can fire you all!"; the corrupt but quite funny official performing marriage ceremonies; the boy playing Misha.

The film is played in Russian with English subtitles. There is only one error when Vadim tells Ira "I can show you the cheque" when he means the receipt. Sometimes the translations are ingenious such as "Pushek" into "Fluffy".

This film can be currently seen on the Singapore Airlines flights between San Francisco and Seoul Incheon. Singapore Airlines provide a much larger choice of films for their passengers than most airlines. Flying from San Francisco to Incheon and back, I have see also a Canadian, a Danish and a German film. They were all good, but this film is a clear winner over them.

This film has been directed well, has good actors and a nice story. There are of course other comedies nice while you watch them. This one has more; there are serious issues to be pondered on after viewing the film. Should a single woman told repeatedly that she cannot give birth to a child consider adoption ? What is the point of view of a girl considered for adoption ? If the company the heroine Ama (Amanda ?) works for has very strict behavior rules, are there situations when breaking these rules is worthwhile ? At what price ?

This film presents a variety of points of view, all plausible, even though some of them contradict some other ones. Even a dog has an opportunity to present his point of view on an issue important to him: with whom he would rather stay ?

Anna Dereszowska has a difficult role as the main female character - precisely because she is not only a nice girl to look at but also a thoughtful person who is trying to make decisions. Jan Wieczorkowski as Marek is very good too, and also he faces difficult decisions.

Our DVD has the sound track mostly in Polish, there are English subtitles. Fantasy comedies aside, considering comedies coming out of Poland in recent years, this is one of my two favorites. The other one is "Darling, don't lie".