Snow White & Russian Red - Film Review

Based on the bestselling novel White and Red by Dorota Maslowska, Xawerego Zulawski's fearless outing here is an often confusing, occasionally funny and always surreal ball of furious, ironic energy wrapped in social commentary.

Shaven headed Silny (Borys Szyc) is a deadbeat slacker, unemployed and living out of his mother's empty house and always on the chase for girls and lines of speed with which to embelish his pseudo-political rants. After his equally messed up girlfriend Magda (Roma Gasiorowska) breaks up with him, Silny openly broods and mopes about his situation, aimlessly wandering into a bizzare, reality breaking series of events, all the while with the backdrop of a strange anti-Russian festival and buildings painted with the colours of the Polish flag.

Like Maslowska's novel, Snow White and Russian Red takes some pretty unorthodox steps to reach it's goal, but unlike the source material that point is almost missed completely. Buried deep in the film's near dreamlike state of over the top set pieces and exaggerated actions is a rueful contemplation on Polish culture post-Warsaw Pact, with a generation of younger souls left fretting and wandering without a cause to fight, choosing to indulge their addictive personalities and talk to death about the wrongs of the past. However, in a shorter time frame and sharing space with more conventional story arcs, it is brought up, forgotten, brought back, ignored and then tossed out in the end as a form of metaphor. One of the glaring problems with Zulawski's film, particularly notable for those unfamiliar with the book, is that it seems to lack a point.

Whether this dooms the film to a post mortem assessment, or merely changes the way it can be enjoyed, is entirely up the viewer. Its politics aside, Snow White and Russian Red is still a fairly entertaining and oddball film, and can be seen as a statement on a soulless enivornment as perceived by those without a commitment or a fight to take on. However, this interpretation does fail to address certain amounts of symbolism and sledgehammer subtlety present in the foreground.

Themes aside, Zulawski has a visual flair that really comes to the fore in the film, delivering some memorable sequences and never shooting a shot that isn't interesting in its own right. Cartoony silliness, such as characters being thrown through the air in slapstick or blatantly impossible physical stunts like a goth girl vomiting rocks, are liberally scattered across the film, along with a crazed, drug fuelled filming style that goes some way to being method in approach.

And the story is bizzare but not uncontrolled, as we constantly dodge around continuity and linear time by rocking backwards and forwards, with some scenes scratched by admission of being false moments later. The author Maslowska appears, playing herself as a young woman writing the story that the disenchanted and baffled Silny is trapped in, manipulating events and even confronting him with the fact in one mind bending, ambiguous scene. That Silny reacts by verbally attacking her is perfectly in keeping with the tone.

Carrying the film on his not inconsequential shoulders, Borys Szyc never fails to deliver appropriate energy, but doesn't quite match up to the image of Silny (or Nails, as in English) readers will have conjured up, perhaps too old and too clown-like, though he does succeed in making Silny almost likeable, something the original, written character never achieved. He isn't helped by the writing, however, with Zulawski only making him a political ranter when it's convenient. Roma Gasiorowska shines, while Maria Strzelecka (as Angela) and Sonia Bohosiewicz (as Natasza) underact and overact respictively, in parts that are little more than extended cameos. Maslowska, fourth wall breaking, clearly isn't an actress.

While Snow White & Russian Red strays from the path of it's origins and loses much of it's subtext and indictment as a result, it does perhaps take White & Red and make it a more enjoyable, more fun slice of weird and endearing entertainment, a reality bending exercise in unconventional storytelling, bringing some interest to a plot that, at its bones, is hardly worth telling. Flawed for sure, and oft incoherent, it none the less is daft enough to work, stupid enough to be smart in a contradictory manner. When all is said and done, a watchable, chaotic film.


6/10