Season 2014/2015 review - POLISH SHIT by Grzegorz Jankowski

A wild and frantic satire on the music industry. POLISH SHIT by GRZEGORZ JANKOWSKI was presented in the SEASON 2014/2015 section of the 15th T-MOBILE NEW HORIZONS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL.

No one would guess it from the title alone, but the inappropriately titled POLISH SHIT by director GRZEGORZ JANKOWSKI is a film about a band of rockets in their thirties still playing dead joints and bars for practically no money. Their last chance at making some cash and gaining some momentum is left in the hands of an unlikely manager, a debt collector who proposes to the leader of the band named The Transistors to organise a tour for them, so that he can pay off his debt to him. 

Of course, the so called manager is incompetent, and sees this tour as an opportunity to give into more of his vices and live the sex, drugs and rock and roll lifestyle of the music industry. The other cats are the typical man child caricatural losers that make up for most comedies, and a lack of any significant backstory doesn't allow them to seem anything but that. 

Jankowski is in fact more willing to wholly embrace a black comedy musical nature for his film with some weak and unoriginal satirical digs at the music industry itself.

Much in the style of a film by SMARKOWSKI, the film is a frantically paced vision of deacdence that is significantly interested by the moral conflicts and vices of its leading figures. The wild editing and shaky camerawork sharply contrasts in the unexpected surreal musical numbers away from the stage, incorporated in the storyline, that are at first interesting and then increasingly tiresome. 

The film's many forays into satirical territory, themselves far from recalling the works of the aforementioned SMARZOWSKI, are very much driven by the band's frustration at their inability to make it big. Ultimately, however, they are let down by what is essentially a predictable plot, unsupported by a lukewarm sense of humour, some of which is perhaps lost in translation, further distances it from classics like THIS IS SPINAL TAP. But the lively and random plot twists, reveal an influx of creativity that keeps POLISH SHIT from being what the non-comformist title would suggest. But its many excesses, including a frustrating nonesensical ending is more likely to leave the viewer deeply unsatisfied than not.