My Friend the Pol­ish Girl

Top marks to co-direc­tors Ewa Banaszkiewicz and Mateusz Dymek for opt­ing to take a strange and scenic route through their trou­bling sto­ry of a Pol­ish immi­grant liv­ing in Lon­don who fails to forge any last­ing con­nec­tions with the peo­ple around her. It’s a tale of extreme alien­ation and insid­i­ous xeno­pho­bia that presents a dust­ed down and fresh­ly kit­ted out ver­sion of the time­worn ​“cul­ture clash” trope through it’s arhyth­mic edit­ing and nat­ty for­mal quirks.

Ane­ta Piotrows­ka plays Alic­ja, a cin­e­ma work­er who aspires to break into act­ing. She is dis­cov­ered by New York doc mak­er Katie (Emma Fried­man-Cohen), a direc­to­r­i­al avatar who is search­ing for the sub­ject of a doc­u­men­tary with no pre­de­ter­mined direc­tion. When she sees that hang-dog expres­sion on film, and discover’s that Alicja’s boyfriend has ter­mi­nal can­cer, she instant­ly spots a cul­tur­al­ly meaty dra­ma to exploit. The film takes the form of a faux fly-on-the-wall doc­u­men­tary, with Katie inter­ro­gat­ing her sub­ject from behind the lens. It also sug­gests an inter­nal emo­tion­al mono­logue via emo­jis and coloured social media-like text flashed across the frame.

It’s a bold film that snakes in dif­fer­ent direc­tions and con­stant­ly under­cuts expec­ta­tion. Alic­ja seems like a sim­ple enough per­son, whose desires and goals appear fair­ly clear-cut. Yet as the film rolls on, she starts to fray at the seams, and her com­plex­i­ties and anx­i­eties rise to the fore. It doesn’t quite work, because the direc­tors nev­er man­age to achieve a con­vinc­ing doc­u­men­tary tone – it’s all obvi­ous act­ed, which doesn’t shat­ter the illu­sion so much as it makes you think about all the intend­ed tex­tur­al with an undue inten­si­ty. It’s nice, how­ev­er, to see a film which opts for the for­mal road less trav­elled, even if the dra­ma is, in the end, a mite thin.