The Seychelles

Bogusław Linda and Zbigniew Zamachowski, absolute idols of the 1990s and also associated with highly commercial cinema, came together toward the end of the Polish People’s Republic to work on a very strange film. The former served as director, while the latter played the lead role. To this day, I can’t decide what to make of it, but I know that such a frenetic and grotesque production could only have been made in that particular place and time.

Zamachowski plays Stefek, a free spirit who constantly gets himself into trouble. While hiding from the militia and the sinister Mrs. Grażyna, he ends up in a psychiatric hospital, and then gets a job as a night watchman at the opera house, which also houses an escort agency.

 

Someone must have said at some point that this bizarre, multi-layered screenplay is a metaphor for Poland, because that’s what people used to say in the ’90s about just about every wildly off-the-wall film. I won’t say that, but The Seychelles certainly presents a world turned upside down and some sort of seemingly comedic pursuit of freedom that ends – perhaps inevitably – in a series of misfortunes.

Music by Voo Voo, starring Grzegorz Ciechowski, plus Wrocław before it became “Wroclove” – back when it was more of a “beware of these places” kind of place.

[Olga Drenda]