Starring: Ewa Szykulska, Ewa Pielach, Regina Regulska, Jan Stawarz, Jan Mateusz
Directed by: Janusz Kondratiuk
“Do you prefer city boys or country guys?” asks a naive young graduate in an awkward attempt to seduce three village girls on a day trip to Warsaw. Most of Andrzej and Janusz Kondratiuk’s comedies feature cinema verité-like dialogues. It seems that even talented actors become instruments for investigating social topics in Communist Poland in the hands of the Kondratiuk brothers.
Dziewczyny do wzięcia (Marriageable Girls) is a 45-minute, sentimental clash between city and country ways of life that ends with a compromise. Two of the girls manage to preserve their virtue, but remain resolute in their ambition to take a great leap toward a new, urban life. The comedy arises from the situations, and not the deadpan and initially hang-dog expressions of the protagonists. Ewa Szykulska, here flashing a fake smile reinforced with metal, is one of the few in the cast who was eventually able to make her career shine like gold in Polish cinema.
The prosaic seduction method adopted by the guys consists in impressing the country girls with urban healthiness, which seems very odd by today’s environmentally-friendly standards. A capacious fridge and a bottle of Italian vermouth are enough to pique the girls’ interest in urban living. With its amalgam of materialistic values and lofty political sentiments, Marriageable Girls is a fascinating insight into Polish life in the 1970s.
Originally published by The Krakow Post on August 03, 2012