348. My Friend The Polish Girl; movie review

MY FRIEND THE POLISH GIRL
Cert 18
87 mins
BBFC advice: Contains brief strong injury detail

Here's a curiosity - a movie which makes out to be a documentary about a mixed-up immigrant but is actually fiction.
There are many reasons why I shouldn't have enjoyed Ewa Banaszkiewicz and Mateusz Dymek's My Friend The Polish Girl and yet I found it strangely alluring.
If I hadn't have known, I could have thought it was a factual piece about wannabe actress, Alicja, wanting to make her mark in the bearpit of London.
And yet I knew that Alicja is, in fact, Aneta Piotrowska and the supposed documentary-maker is not Katie, as suggested in the film, but actress Emma Friedman-Cohen.
Katie goes through the process of auditioning young people to be the subject of a movie which she hopes will reflect today's society.
She alights upon Alicja when she says her boyfriend has cancer.
This is the first of many strange things the complex character says and does during the course of a movie.
However, despite being someone who seems to enjoy the limelight, we never find out what is behind her intriguing behaviour.
And that is where My Friend The Polish Girl falls down - there is a lack of insight into what makes either woman tick.
So, while I was engaged by many scenes, I needed greater explanation when it came to the denouement.
On the plus side, both Piotrowska and Friedman-Cohen were entirely believable in their roles and the movie does offer a rare insight into the loneliness and financial insecurity of emigrants to a foreign country.
Indeed, Alicja's attempts to fit in lead to exaggerated or even alarming behaviour.


Reasons to watch: Curios take on Polish immigration
Reasons to avoid: Too arty for its own good

Laughs: None
Jumps: None
Vomit: None
Nudity: Yes
Overall rating: 7/10

Did you know? Of the 3.7 million EU citizens living in the UK, it’s estimated that just under one million are Polish nationals, the largest single nationality from the rest of the EU. They’re followed by an estimated 433,000 Romanians and 337,000 Irish nationals.

Final word. Mateusz Dymek: "Since we’ve made documentary films in the past, we were quite aware of the inevitable manipulation that goes into them. There’s also often a lot of pretend befriending involved to get close to your subject and that’s something we always felt uncomfortable with. But it’s not that we necessarily wanted to critique documentarians, but more the perceived “nobleness” of an artist. If anything, the film is a critique of ourselves." London Student

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