KINGSIZE - A Polish feature film
	Produced in: 1987
	Director: Juliusz Machulski
	Script: Iolanta Chartwich, Juliusz Machulski
	Cameraman: Iezy Lukashevich
	Music: Ksheshimir Dembsky
	Scenography: Janus Sosnovsky
	With: Yatsek Hmielnik, Katarzyna Figura, Iezy Shtur etc.
	Awards: "Gdansk Lions" for scenography at the 13th festival
of Polish feature film, Gdansk '88
	Special award at the 17th International film festival
Avoriaz '89.
	
	IVAN HADZHIEV
	
	"KINGSIZE": HOPES AND ILLUSIONS IN A LABYRINTH
	
	For the last few years, Polish film magazines have been
constantly writing about a crisis in Polish films and film
culture. The new laws and reforms in cinematography have not
yielded the expected results; cinema-goers avoid the ambitious
problem films, while the repertoires of the state and private
videoteques just add to the picture of the prevailing lack of
taste ... In spite of the praiseworthy heritage of the Polish
film school of the fifties, in spite of Wajda's Palme d'Or and
the several recent Grands-Prix awarded to Kieslawski (in Cannes,
San Sebastian and the first European "Felix"), in spite of the
great Zanussy and his talented disciples, almost every
Gdansk-Gdynia Film Festival brings sobering characterizations
that act like a cold shower on Polish cultural circles.
	No doubt, the socio-political cataclysms, the unstable
economy and the huge foreign debts have had a direct effect on
the film industry whose existence is impossible without
increasingly greater investments. "We live in a disrupted and
chaotic reality ... Everything is disintegrating, there are only
problems..." (Adam Choroszczok, "Ekran" issue 9/1989). The Polish
critic is rather skeptical about the "phobia treatment of our
queuing, emaciated audiences with the help of nightmare visions."
Like, for example, such anti-utopian films as "Internal Life"
("Zycie Wewnetrzne") and "Ha, Ha - Glory to the Heroes" ("Cha,
Cha, Slawa Bohaterow"). Audiences, however, do not prefer the
traditional "serious" film (the first to lose ground) or the
total resignation of the "black fantasy" with its open political
allusions, but a third type of film, whose harbingers were,
perhaps, "Va bank", "Sexmission" and "A Train To Hollywood" from
Poland and the universal thrillers and space operas from the
West. In the light of comedy's power of expression in the wide
range of the satirical - from the hint of irony to the bold
deformation of the grotesque, these Polish films did not fail in
their topicality but had already reached for more universal
values and were, all things considered, entertaining ...
	Yuliusz Machulski's films gained immediate and definite
recognition and at the right time ("Va bank" 1 and 2, 1981, 1984;
"Sexmission", 1983; "Kingsize", 1987). Indeed, considering that
the film director's profession is not limited only to frame
composition and acting, why not admire this author's ingenuity
and intelligence? And then, many of his colleagues know
everything about Fritz Lang's film myth "Metropolis", about the
epochal Melies; they would hardly have done without the Brothers
Grimm, Swift, or Bradbury; they have devoured Orwell and Evgeny
Zamyatin with grim satisfaction but how many of them have
presented in such an organic way and in the context of national
culture, the fate of the individual, tossed like a toy in the
terrible mechanism of manipulation?... Somewhere beyond the
borders of Abuladze's ancient heavy, grotesque tragedy in
"Repentance", Machulski ridicules that incredibly invulnerable 
20th century monster, the totalitarian society, doing it in a way
that is both playful and bitter with the stripping irony of
depiction.
	The Polish failures and crises, the grim pictures of poverty
and neglect have not evaporated from Machulski's films. They have
rather been condensed into a compact pill that is also bitter,
but it at last somewhat alleviates the headache.....
	"Kingsize" portrays an eccentric fantasy model of parallel
worlds, where the size scale is a measure of social perfection
that turns out to be relative. The Lilliputian world, medievally
totalitarian, is arranged in the drawers of an old card-index
box. The values that it enjoys are the scraps of the bigger
world, while the dwarfs stand in stupefied terror, or jump
obsequiously before the law-and-order authorities (called
"oleleyniks", also gnomes but with bottle caps screwed on their
heads) and the supreme power, represented by its leader, "The
Great Eater" (vividly portrayed by Yerzy Sztur in a background of
abominable greyness of the other characters), who hypocritically
calls the others "best men". There are no women here (unlike in
"Sexmission"). They are probably banned. The occupations
practiced are limited to black marketeering, parading and
slandering (with the respective gramophone record torturing, the
egg-cutter guillotine, etc.) Only the elite few possess the
secret of growing bigger and use it for their personal gain and
for ruling over the others. The conflict starts when a chemist,
instead of "fulfilling his official duties", discovers the magic
formula that would give the dwarfs the freedom to choose which
world to live in. He is duly repressed but the forces of Good,
the Hero (superman-chameleon, actor Yatsek Hmielnik), the Beauty
(destructively erotic Katarzyna Figura) and a handful of
freedom-loving dwarfs start the struggle. The breakneck chases in
both worlds (too artificial and wasteful in my opinion, but
resourceful in the rejection of electronic modelling, the effects
being accomplished by means of scenographic magnifying of 1:20),
enable the authors (Scriptwriter Yolanta Chartwicz, a lecturer in
children's literature and Machulski himself) to ridicule, through
clever metaphor and clever word play in the dialogue, both the
demagogy of the dwarf leader and the false values of contemporary
civilization (the big world).
	The fantasy model of "Kingsize" (similar to that in
"Sexmission"), has it's frame of reference in familiar structures
but also has a color of its own: in the social connotation of its
characters, in the animated objects, in the detailed study of the
evil dwarf leader, already stripped of his mysticism and now
earthy, comprehensible and vulnerable. Although fatally doomed to
continue forever, the play-struggle grows beyond the ethical
motives of the fairy-tales, it saturates them with a progressive
and humane implied meaning and irresistibly attracts with the
very fact that it is possible, with the purifying strength of
positive action. Very impressive, from the cinematographic point
of view, are some scenes, like the life-or-death battle between
the dwarfs on the rim of a God-forsaken toilet bowl, in its real
and repulsive appearance and size...
	The film ends in gloomy ambiguity: escaping a Lilliputian
world and destroying it, the characters turn out to be dwarfs
again, in comparison to another, third, and most probably again
totalitarian world (symbolized with the cult style architecture
of the Warsaw Palace of Culture, seen through a sinister
keyhole), again easily manipulated, lost in a vicious circle.
This fatal end, however, with its ambiguity is perhaps a
compulsory moral gesture by the authors towards the people whose
hopes and illusion for a better life should receive due
respect...
	Kingsize - a dream-world for the dwarfs; the potion for	
growing bigger.