Directed by: Michał Kwieciński
Starring: Eryk Kulm jr, Robert Więckiewicz, Victor Meutelet
Rating: ★★★☆☆
The drama of civilian forced laborers in the Third Reich has never been a hot topic in feature films set during World War II. Polish producer and now second-time director Michał Kwieciński went on to pull off the shelf Filip (1961), a semi-autobiographical novel from Polish émigré Leopold Tyrman published in the novelist’s homeland before he started a new life in the US. The book offers a partially fictional account on the way Tyrman eluded death during wartime working as a waiter in Germany on false papers.
It would be too cliché to ask an actor like Eryk Kulm jr. to play Cyrano de Bergerac or Pinocchio on a theatre stage due to his big nose a la Adam Driver. In Filip, Kwieciński staked almost everything on this promising thesp in the titular role of his atypical war movie in which the audience has to wait until the end to see the first bombs falling from the sky. The decision of casting Kulm as Filip hit the bull’s eye.
The storyline explores the public and secret life of Jewish server Filip that claims to be a French citizen in order to flee persecution. The young man works in the restaurant of a luxury hotel in Frankfurt with a cosmopolitan staff made from the crème de la crème of “privileged” forced laborers recruited outside Germany. In public, Filip is an exemplary worker; while in private, he is a tireless womanizer with an acquired taste for degrading the local ladies that come his way in the hotel – a hedonistic seduce-and-destroy payback for the cruel tyranny displayed by Germans under the Nazi regime.
Kwieciński’s film, mostly in German and French, breaths new life into Polish cinema, confined as it has been since the Fifties, to celebrating Poland’s wartime heroes from the underground resistance. The character played by Kulm seems to suggest that every man for himself is the only option left in difficult times. Filip the “humiliator” is all but a military martyr ready to sacrifice all for his country.
The waiter’s sensual affairs in the rubble of war were filmed with a verve that recalls Warsaw 44 (2014) also thanks to Michał Sobociński’s remarkable cinematography. It might be worth mentioning that Kwieciński himself was a producer to Jan Komasa’s war-and-love cinematic gem. Filip scooped a Silver Lion at the Gdynia Film Festival while Kulm received the Zbyszek Cybulski Award, the top prize in Poland for young actors.
Film Reviewed by Giuseppe Sedia
Published by Kino Mania on March 08, 2023