On the heels of Hawaii, Oslo comes another movie involving characters of separate trajectories bound together by relationships and events. Warsaw shares the theme of love as a unifying (and destructive) force with Hawaii, Oslo, but I believe the similarities fall away from there.
Warsaw depicts a day in the life of different characters with different goals. A woman stops in Warsaw on the way to Andalusia with the hopes of finding love. A man leaves an orphanage he has lived in for most of his life to find a job. A fruit farmer arrives in the capital with the hopes of finding his long-lost daughter. A confused, aged war veteran can't find his way home.
Director Dariusz Gajewski places these characters together only at the very end. The audience sees the interconnections between the characters slowly uncover themselves, but the characters are not as quick to catch on; they pass each other on the street, unknowingly.
The character development and storyline was reasonably good in this film, albeit with a somewhat weak tying-together of the storylines at the end. But, the most striking part of this film for me was the portrayal of Warsaw as a new, modern Eastern European city, versus the Warsaw at the conclusion of World War II that we've all seen in film footage. The film depicts modern Europeans going about their lives in a modern (and snowy) capital city, with scenes that could play out just as well in Berlin or Edinburgh. For those of us who haven't traveled to Poland (myself included), the film becomes a peek into modern life in the city and challenges viewers to remake Warsaw in their (potentially stereotyped) minds.
Overall rating: 6.5/10.0
Details:
Runtime: 104m
Country: Poland
Language: Polish
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