The Cruise

(Rejs, 1970)

   Cult comedy directed by Marek Piwowski, who also scripted the film with Janusz Głowacki. The film speaks with a distinctly Polish idiom virtually inaccessible to an outsider. It portrays a group of people on board the Dzerzhinsky during a leisurely tour on the river. Its situational humor and dialogues refer to the current political reality and laugh at the schizophrenic absurdities of Communist Poland. Piwowski's film is a bitter satire on Communism with its references to newspeak, the Władysław Gomułka epoch, and the private and official truth. The quasi-documentary look of the film is due to improvised dialogues, episodic structure, and the presence of nonprofessional actors/types. The Cruise also features a number of character actors, including Zdzisław Mak-lakiewicz, Jan Himilsbach, and Stanisław Tym. Maklakiewicz, as Engineer Mamoń, delivers a frequently cited talk about the misery of Polish cinema: "In Polish film it is as follows: boredom . . . nothing happens . . . poor dialogues, very poor dialogues . . . in general, there is no action, nothing happens. One wonders why they do not copy foreign films."

   Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema by Marek Haltof