A Comic Critique
His third film, The Marriage of Convenience, contained traces of social commentary that became key in his later films. Hisearly works had been criticised for being unworldly and for a style stemming from pre-war cinema, but a new Bareja would emerge by the 1970s. He collaborated with the satirical actor Jacek Fedorowicz (a founder of the famous Bim-Bom student cabaret in the 1950s) on films including The Marriage of Convenience (1966) and A Jungle Book of Regulations (1974), a comical critique of Polish housing problems. With the actor and writer Stanisław Tym, he made Brunet Will Call (1976), What Will You Do When You Catch Me? (1978) and Teddy Bear (1980), for which the director is best known. In Teddy Bear, an ironic comedy about the People's Republic of Poland, the passport of a sports club is destroyed by his wife and he is unable to go to London to withdraw money from his bank account. Maciej Pawlicki wrote in Film magazine:
Bareja’s first films were quite different from those from the eighties. The line of their evolution is clear, the meanders of this line speak volumes, not only about the history of Polish cinema, but generally about the history of our culture [...] Bareja's innocent comedies suddenly started facing serious problems. There were dozens of interferences with the screenplays and the completed films.
Bareja's later films concerned contemporary problem, not "antiquated comedies", yet critics were still upset by his work. The director spotted his films' surrealisms in the surrounding world. As Maciej Pawlicki writes "he showed us that our world was upside down and we all pretended not to see it, or maybe actually didn’t see it". His use of life experiences crossed boundaries with documentary cinema. Hanna Kotkowska-Bareja, the director’s wife, said: "He was always most inspired by reality [...], so his films often included parts of our lives – places, situations, events and often objects".
