Starring: Mariusz Bonaszewski, Andrzej Chyra, Olgierd Łukaszewicz
Directed by: Adrian Panek
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
An increasing number of young Polish filmmakers have recently been rewarded for their patient work in the form of support from the Polish Film Institute. Adrian Panek is an example. He was given the chance to direct a costume drama that, unusually, he wrote from scratch rather than adapting from an historical literary work.
Panek was able to leverage the positive feedback he received for his short film Moja biedna głowa (My Poor Head, 2009), a family drama with the brusque appeal of Slawomir Fabicki’s films. He has also benefited from mentoring by the authoritative director Filip Bajon. It was Bajon who encouraged Panek to pursue an idea he had been toying with since his college days.
Dass is based around the story of the self-proclaimed, 18th-century Jewish messiah Jakob Frank (Olgierd Łukaszewicz) following his exile to Vienna. In fact, Frank makes few appearances in the movie, which instead focuses on the lives of Jakub Goliński (Andrzej Chyra), a government official and former member of the Frankist sect, and his superior Henryk Klein (Mariusz Bonaszewski) who was responsible for the conviction of the influential kabbalist.
As a costume drama, Dass is in a class of its own by not being derived from literary sources, but this is not enough to make it worthy of wide distribution abroad. Arkadiusz Tomak’s cinematography is noteworthy for the way it isolates and picks bewigged figures out of the dark without any redundant decoration.
Originally published by The Krakow Post on November 12, 2011