Directed by: Maciej Kawalski
Starring: Tomasz Kot, Marcin Dorociński, Andrzej Seweryn, Wojciech Mecwaldowski
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Nobody is born doctor and particularly Maciej Kawalski who studied medicine in Silesia before he turned to filmmaking. Quite similarly, Tadeusz “Boy” Żeleński was a Cracow-educated physician that abandoned the white coat in 1919 to embrace writing as a career. While it would be simplistic to claim that Kawalski used the character of his local literature hero played by Tomasz Kot as his own alter ego in the script of Niebezpieczni dżentelmeni (Dangerous Gentleman), Żeleński undoubtedly represents a part of the real Kawalski in his self-written debut feature film based on a “story that could have happened but it didn’t”.
Żeleński is thrown in the narrative fray set in the Tatra Mountains together with 3 other Polish non-conformists contemporary to him – the characters are all based on real persons. Eccentric Stanisław “Witkacy” Witkiewicz (Marcin Dorociński), whose father created the Zakopane Style, hosts a wild party attended, among others, by Żeleński, the introverted anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (Wojciech Mecwaldowski) and Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad (Andrzej Seweryn). The quartet of intellectuals wakes up with an enormous hallucination-ridden hangover just to find out the corpse of an unknown man on the floor.
Despite the initial odds, Dangerous Gentlemen is more than a rustic re-enactment of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) aiming to amuse the Polish audience. Kawalski plays with the history of his homeland with the unaffected liberality which is often displayed by debuting filmmakers. He does it, however, not exceeding the bounds of tastefulness in a film that stars some of the best thesps available nowadays in Poland – Kot and Dorociński are the gentlemen that really stand out in his captivating comedy. Ultimately, in Kawalski’s hands even the caricature of Lenin (Jacek Koman) and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya (Wiktoria Gorodeckaja) that break suddenly into the plot turn out to be plausible on the big screen.
Dangerous Gentleman boasts a fanciful gallery of highly coloured characters caught playing cops-and-robbers when the Polish Highlands was under Austrian rule at the end of 19th century. Kawalski also offers a nonchalant tribute to Zakopane in its old good days when the most renowned resort in Poland, despite being a unpaved maze of muddy roads, functioned as a magnet for the local thinking class and artists alike. Dangerous Gentleman was the public’s favourite at the International Film Warsaw Festival in 2022.
Film Reviewed by Giuseppe Sedia
Published by Kino Mania on May 08, 2023