Tricks (Sztuczki)

Country: Poland
Director & Screenwriter: Andrej Jakimowski
UK Release Date: 4 September 2007

I saw this film some weeks ago as part of the 2009 Bath Film Festival. Set in a small Polish town, it follows the lives of a six year old boy and his older sister during a long hot summer.
I bumped into someone after the screening who, though ambivalent enough about the film, said he found it slow, and claustrophobic. I didn't say anything at the time but here I am now, impelled by his comment to share my experience of Tricks.

It is slow. My acquaintance consented that this is intentional, widely accepted as it is that life in a post-communist rural Eastern European town is slow. But is slowness a fault? There is a certain "get on with it" feel to more and more mainstream movies that I dislike. Admittedly most people go to the cinema to get out the house. Not just a change of scene, a cornucopia of scenes. Laughs and thrills work a charm. This clearly forms audiences used to quick-fire editing and fast turnover of scenes at the expense of plot and/or plausibility. Come on, come on, what's going to happen next, where's the action, what's the point of making us wait, I want to know now.

The point of non-action shots is to set a mood. To build the scaffolding of the world you are being immersed in. You are assimilating scenery, faces, lives, not simply waiting for something to happen. This is contrary to how it may feel at first. It takes time to adjust from the adrenaline of a rollercoaster to the smooth gliding of a row boat. But it's worth it.

Sit back and feel the langour of life in this world, their world. Enjoy the sun-drenched warmth on their freckled skin, the dry crispness of apples they eat, the rush and growl of a motorbike breaking the monotony, the rare toots of trains passing. Give it a moment to sink in and you will truly appreciate the tragedy of this idyll. Life is about the small things. Not much happens. Just like real life. The bigger picture is more often than not forgot.

This is really well-encapsulated by a child protagonist. When you're young, a lot of stuff is fascinating. Pigeons, trains, human behaviour, destiny. The bigger picture is absorbed into everyday life. Why are things as they are and how do they get to be that way? That most abstract and cryptic of all questions is turned into a game, a set of tricks. The main adult in the boy's summer days, the young woman that is his sister, seems to hold the truth, know the answer, and yet somehow when it gets to bigger things life can escape her too.

This ties in with my real beef with the film's description by said acquaintance- "claustrophobic". Films are not just stories and talking and scores- they are most blatantly a visual art. And this film has so many shots of sky! Birds flowing over the expanse of blue, tops of trees rustling against mountains. And shots of movement, the motorbike flying across dusty roads, trains always rushing in and rushing out again.

The story itself is stuck in a small town, sure, but claustrophobia is a physical feeling, and how could you possibly feel it with all that space opening in front of you? I truly never felt that the little town was ever portrayed as, or felt, a confined area. That sounds more like something you would say if you hadn't seen the film, and only concluded from the blurb on the cinema listings. There's no denying "Small boy spends summer in small rural Polish town" sounds like it might be a leetle claustrophobic.

But it isn't. What I felt was a great, deep, emptiness. Swinging shots of cloudless sky and steady ones of lonely vehicles on empty roads... Trains and birds the little boy never gets on or follows, only watches, again and again... A life empty of excitement, where opportunities are scarce and unforgiving. Where bright kids like the main characters really have to both forge and make up their lives as they go along, create their own entertainment, whittle their own echelons onto the ladder up and out.

This film had a sweet, mellow, but sincerely lasting effect on me. When I got out in the cold Bath rain I couldn't feel the sun on my skin any more but I sure as anything could that warm feeling inside. Faith in humanity is a good feeling, so is faith in film-making, and Tricks provided this writer with both.


(Nov. 2009)