The Reverse

Colour, 35 mm
Poland, 2009, 101 min
Section: Variety Critics’ Choice

Synopsis

In 1952, during the peak of Stalinist terror in communist Poland, an encounter with the secret police changes life for three generations of women in the good-looking, tonally sophisticated The Reverse. Rich with references to Polish culture and cinema history, the genre-juggling feature debut of prize-winning documaker Borys Lankosz is clever, complex and spiked with a special kind of black humor. Prim 30-year-old spinster Sabina works as a poetry editor in a Warsaw publishing house and shares a crowded apartment with her resourceful mother, Irena, and ailing but alert grandmother. Eager for Sabina to marry, the older women put forward a string of unsuitable candidates. But shy Sabina, whose heart flutters at the manly bare chests of soldiers glimpsed in cinema newsreels, finds her own macho admirer seemingly by chance.