Rat

Sleaze-ball businessman gets into legal / mafia troubles, hoofs it, and ends up in an surreal underground homeless colony run by a man named "Rat"—who happens to possess a trove of old communist documents that, if published, would expose a slew of high-profile politicians as former collaborators. Original title: Szczur.


Foreshadows of Kusturica's Underground and Caranfil's Filantropica play on the walls of Jan Łomnicki's political satire, but it's a poor film: topical (even prescient, given the more-recent Polish interest in post-communist lustration—not to mention last year's book about Lech Wałesa's activities as "Agent Bolek") and not uninteresting, but so poorly-written / produced that it's hardly worth the time. The most one can say about it is that it gets better [because the beginning is especially awful]. Only a handful shots are worth their film stock, acting stinks even from actors who are dependable. Predictable laughs keep it tolerable, however; and buried beneath the plot and dialogue, there are ideas. One: the film ultimately resolves its moral / political / historical conundrum by advocating the destruction of the old police files (an act that provides the film with its only haunting moment) on the argument that those who want the files—though they're "clean" themselves because they didn't collaborate—are as morally-spoiled as those they'd be denouncing and replacing. Thus, the only result from such a power switcheroo would be inevitable damage to innocents. It's a solution that might make Milan Kundera happy, but I guess I'm too truth-loving (vengeful?) to accept it. Indeed, films that argue in favour of suppressing truth "for the public good" (recently: The Dark Knight) always make me a bit suspicious. But that's politics; rather more-distressing is that Szczur is simply bad art.

The rats have already left the Rat.

Jan Łomnicki, 1995