We're All Christs - Film Review

After my previous foray into Polish cinema, in the form of Your Name is Justine, bore fruit, naturally it makes sense to go in again. And it's funny what diamonds in the rough you can find when you choose to embrace subtitles.

Wszyscy Jestesmy Chrystusami, or 'We're All Christs', is a bizzare and completely oddball life journey film from Marek Koterski, which looks at alcoholism, religuous symbolism and maintenance man esque guardian angels with never anything less than the mood after seventeen vodkas.

Using a chronologically non-linear format, not to mention numerous digressions into fourth wall breaking narrative trysts, the film tells the story of Adam (Andrzej Chyra as a younger man, Marek Kondrat as an older man) a hopelessly drunken tutor at a Warsaw university, specialising in culture and Christian iconography. An alcoholic, Adam struggles in later years to come to terms with his bizzare life that pretty much alienates him from everyone, in particular his son Sylwek (Michal Koterski). The film is framed by their ongoing conversation, in which they discuss how they remember Sylwek's dysfunctional childhood, utterly defiled by Adam's drinking.

Over the course of his life, Adam figuratively puts all his loved ones on the cross, making them his Jesus by ensuring they pay for his sins, while he makes excuses, misremembers key moments and generally refuses to recognise the reckoning coming, or the efforts made by afore-mentioned angel to steer him down the right path. Instead he ventures down to his local, the bar onboard an anchored barge, and swaps rational explanations with his fellow barflys, who are similarly wary of taking responsibility. Then, the transition, with Adam going from 33 to 55 in the blink of an eye, his son fully grown and struggling through college, acquiring some of his father's more addictive personality traits. Suddenly the whimsy is rather tragic.

Although Koterski clearly has a humourous sensibility, and make no mistake, there are some genuinely hilarious scenes and wonderfully witty dialogue exchanges in We're All Christs (highlights include Adam's botched suicide attempt and his experience of a gypsy rabbit dinner), there's clearly a very serious subject being broached here and it's handled superbly, that being the destructive nature of alcohol on the family, and it's long lasting effects. Rather than going for a cringingly familiar gritty route, Koterski's off-beat and surreal approach means the message is warm but also cutting, amiable but effective.

The aside to Jesus Christ, which provides the source of the film's name and almost all of it's own symbolism, is actually a means to an end and a pretty good metaphor for a socially less divine theme, the punishment of others by the punishing of self. Though never a bad person, Adam is killing his loved ones, so although he may see himself as carrying the cross, they are forced to alongside him. It's a neat analogy, and not as weighty on film as it sounds on paper. If such a thing as religuously charged satire didn't exist before, it does now.

And the two Adams, Chyra and Kondrat, both shine with lovely and soulful performances, both vulnerable, poignant yet comically astute and charming. Chyra in particular, as the younger incarnation, is highly entertaining, and the support don't let anyone down. It's quite an insular piece, with a character limit and many (including Adam's wife and mother) not even having names. The film is sharply and intelligently edited, resulting in plenty of Gilligan Cuts and quick beated cuts, fades, and scene interruptions. It gives the movie a distinctive tone and mood, never trying to make you feel sad, but perhaps sometimes managing it anyway, like a drunken man's funny story.

If unique, truly funny, bizzare and poignant shaggy dog story telling is your thing, the chances are you'll probably find a place in your heart for this wonderful little film, one that has with it's slapstick and ironic wit a pumping, feeling heart. Just don't praise it too loudly, or in too many numbers, of they'll probably remake the bloody thing.

9/10