The movie begins slowly, insinuating itself into the lives of a handful of faceless Polish farmers, a study in pastoral torpor, towards the end of World War II. Well, I guess they're not all faceless. There are two fetching teen-aged girls who weave in and out of the picture in order to peel huge piles of potatoes and tempt the young men.
The pace remains leisurely throughout, but it gradually draws us into the story of these characters. The principals remind me of a long layover I had at Union Station in Chicago. I wandered into a bar a few blocks away and the dozen customers all looked more or less like Fryderyk and Witold -- shabby, whiskery, a little dazed but quietly alert. The bartender was running numbers and one customer came in to play but shakily refused a drink, trying to escape his demons.
Some of the customers were speaking Polish but I doubt they were saying anything like some of the lines that Fryderyk (Krzysztof Majchrzak) comes up with. He tells a woman why he plays that catchy tune on the piano -- happy, but sad too. There was a Pole once who was married to a Jew. The mother died and left the young girl behind. When the war came, she and her father were taken to the same camp but the father refused to recognize her. He'd "become an animal" after spending a week in the box car "with corpses and s***." In the film's last shot the camera slowly moves in on a snap shot of Fryderyk's daughter on his lap, and she's the most breathlessly beautiful and the happiest and the most heartbreakingly innocent creature you could imagine.
There's a murder too. In fact, two murders. But the first we don't see at all, and the second only in confused silhouette. There are a couple of German soldiers who appear once or twice but they're jolly enough regular fellows, a little clumsy, good-natured, looking for eggs and no more. The photography is memorable.
And yet the war is always somewhere in the background, the kind of indefinite threat that people don't pay attention to after a while. And in the end it leads to the murder of a collaborator who has revealed himself to Witold as a very human, very scared sort of monster, nobody's idea of a stereotype.
There are two narrative threads, if we disregard the ones that lead nowhere. Some plot strands are just plain dead ends. (A farm boy commits the first murder for no apparent reason, is imprisoned in a bell tower, and then one of the girls sleeps with him. Why? Nobody knows.) But of the two major themes, one involves that flunky of the Germans, Colonal Siemien, whom we see only sweaty with fear and confusion. The other has to do with the affections of Henia, a succulent nymph who may or may not love the handsome, dumb, young Karol but who, in any case, is supposed to marry the self-effacing Waclaw, who is well-read and of higher social standing. Henia is no innocent adolescent though. She may be young -- she may look like a Polish LOLITA -- but she's slept around and continues to do so when she feels like it. By the end, Henia's conundrum seems like small Kartofellen.
"Pornography" means literally "writing about prostitutes." But if anybody is looking for soft-core porn in which Henia is subjected to gang bangs among the haystacks and in the barns, it's not here. The "pornography" of the title has nothing to do with sex. It has to do with something more dreadful than Henia or her inexperienced swains dream about.
The pace remains leisurely throughout, but it gradually draws us into the story of these characters. The principals remind me of a long layover I had at Union Station in Chicago. I wandered into a bar a few blocks away and the dozen customers all looked more or less like Fryderyk and Witold -- shabby, whiskery, a little dazed but quietly alert. The bartender was running numbers and one customer came in to play but shakily refused a drink, trying to escape his demons.
Some of the customers were speaking Polish but I doubt they were saying anything like some of the lines that Fryderyk (Krzysztof Majchrzak) comes up with. He tells a woman why he plays that catchy tune on the piano -- happy, but sad too. There was a Pole once who was married to a Jew. The mother died and left the young girl behind. When the war came, she and her father were taken to the same camp but the father refused to recognize her. He'd "become an animal" after spending a week in the box car "with corpses and s***." In the film's last shot the camera slowly moves in on a snap shot of Fryderyk's daughter on his lap, and she's the most breathlessly beautiful and the happiest and the most heartbreakingly innocent creature you could imagine.
There's a murder too. In fact, two murders. But the first we don't see at all, and the second only in confused silhouette. There are a couple of German soldiers who appear once or twice but they're jolly enough regular fellows, a little clumsy, good-natured, looking for eggs and no more. The photography is memorable.
And yet the war is always somewhere in the background, the kind of indefinite threat that people don't pay attention to after a while. And in the end it leads to the murder of a collaborator who has revealed himself to Witold as a very human, very scared sort of monster, nobody's idea of a stereotype.
There are two narrative threads, if we disregard the ones that lead nowhere. Some plot strands are just plain dead ends. (A farm boy commits the first murder for no apparent reason, is imprisoned in a bell tower, and then one of the girls sleeps with him. Why? Nobody knows.) But of the two major themes, one involves that flunky of the Germans, Colonal Siemien, whom we see only sweaty with fear and confusion. The other has to do with the affections of Henia, a succulent nymph who may or may not love the handsome, dumb, young Karol but who, in any case, is supposed to marry the self-effacing Waclaw, who is well-read and of higher social standing. Henia is no innocent adolescent though. She may be young -- she may look like a Polish LOLITA -- but she's slept around and continues to do so when she feels like it. By the end, Henia's conundrum seems like small Kartofellen.
"Pornography" means literally "writing about prostitutes." But if anybody is looking for soft-core porn in which Henia is subjected to gang bangs among the haystacks and in the barns, it's not here. The "pornography" of the title has nothing to do with sex. It has to do with something more dreadful than Henia or her inexperienced swains dream about.