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The title is prizefighting lingo for an automatic win from an adversary's absence, "no greater shame" to the pugilist-poet-dropout (Jerzy Skolimowski). He gets off at Plock to follow a blonde (Aleksandra Zawieruszanka), who once got him expelled from the university and now oversees the construction of a cathedral where goats used to graze, her boss can't interest him in an engineering gig. "What do you specialize in?" "Haven't decided yet." The shopkeeper feeds cake to the doomed dog, the priest is an addled holdover from the war. For the athlete there's always the ring, told he's over the middleweight limit he jogs around the gym to sweat away the extra grams. He turns 30 at midnight, "a birthday is the right day to think about death." The edge of adulthood and the irrevocable dream, Poland in flux captured by Skolimowski in a whirl of vigorous invention. Continuous movement for those going nowhere, the camera at once fluid and abrupt, a bracing accumulation of zigzagging motion and jagged space. (The culmination finds the protagonist aboard a speeding train alongside a fellow boxer on a motorcycle, a hair-raising coup de cinéma capped with a literalization of Henry Miller's definition of growth.) "That would've been a knockout." The scales that can't be borrowed, the radio that can't be pawned, the watch that can't be trusted. Cutout silhouettes for the tenuous couple, a confession tricked by the bogus cleric and another tossed at the recording studio. Above all the arena, where Skolimowski drops to the canvas with a vision of the suicidal lass played by his soon-to-be ex (Elzbieta Czyzewska). "What's wrong with you?" "It's called fighting your shadow." No epiphany in the end, just another bruise to go with the seeker's new year. With Krzysztof Chamiec, Andrzej Herder, Stanislaw Marian Kaminski, and Franciszek Pieczka. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |