"I keep trying to make my Western readers understand that the West is itself to blame for being degenerate, tired, and confused", said Radek Knapp, a Polish writer living in Vienna for the past 30 years, where he has been greatly successful, in an interview for "Gazeta Wyborcza" (21 November 2008). "A Pole or any other Slav coming here from his impoverished reality should be a gulp of fresh water for them. The problem is, Polish people are ashamed of their best qualities and as soon as they cross the border, they start copying Westerners. It takes just a few days for them to start mutilating their native tongue, I hear them in the Vienna underground, pretending to be Austrians, stuttering in German. It's no longer just complexes, it's stupidity."
Knapp describes a Pole's contact with the Western world, specifically with Austria, in his best-selling novel Herrn Kukas Empfehlungen / Mr. Kuka's Advice (1999, Polish ed. 2003), the literary original of Dariusz Gajewski's film.
The film's main character is Waldemar, a young Polish man who wants to get a taste of the West. Influenced by his well travelled neighbour Mr. Kuka, he chooses Vienna as his first foreign destination. Before setting off, he receives some important advice to help him in an unfamiliar world. The most important tip is "make sure you don't end up in a T-shirt with 'Can I serve you?' on it", another tells him how to look for cheap accommodation, yet another warns him against revealing his identity... Equipped with Mr. Kuka's good advice, Waldemar departs for Vienna on a coach full of smugglers. He soon learns that Mr. Kuka's advice won't help much if he doesn't get smarter himself, as well as freeing himself of his naiveté and a whole host of purely Polish complexes.
Contemporary Austrian cinema as well as literature, including the works of Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, presents Vienna and its residents as a community of dreadful bourgeois - conservative, self-centred, and hostile not only towards strangers but also local misfits, who arouse an irrational fear. Knapp's prose breaks away from this image - in fact this could be the secret of its success, confirmed by the opinion of Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the guru of German-language critics. Knapp's Austrians are not only capable of being friendly to strangers, but are even fascinated by them. It is thanks to them that Waldemar's initiation journey becomes not only enlightening but charming and cheerful, though also dangerous at times.
Dariusz Gajewski, winner of the Gdynia festival's Golden Lions award for his controversially received Warszawa / Warsaw - a story about young people flocking to the Polish capital in search of opportunity, returns to motifs familiar from his debut (Waldemar is played by Łukasz Garlicki, who had a similar part in Warszawa / Warsaw). All the same, his film doesn't try to warn anyone about the dangers of travelling into the unknown. On the contrary, maintaining the cheerful humour of the original and the double perception of Vienna - Austrian and Polish, like Radek Knapp in his novel it paints a personal portrait of the city on the Danube, friendly to people who are curious about the world and have courage. Waldemar is such a person - one of many young Poles who overcome age-old Polish complexes towards the mysticized West and set off abroad in search of opportunity. Knapp's novel was about the times before 1989, Gajewski's film is set in the present. Isn't that too late for his diagnosis to be considered up-to-date? Not at all, given that Witold Gombrowicz wrote about the Polish complexes already half a century ago, not to mention Sławomir Mrożek and his Emigranci / The Emigrants.
"In this film you can feel a nostalgia for the times when the West was a mystery to us. It not only smelled of real chocolate and oranges back then. It was a substitute for actual reality. In [communist] times, during their travels the Poles - politically exiled from the old Europe - discovered it greedily, disinterestedly. The film is an invitation to such a journey", Tadeusz Sobolewski concludes his review in "Gazeta Wyborcza" (21 November 2008).
- Lekcje pana Kuki (Herrn Kukas Empfehlungen) / Mr. Kuka's Advice. Poland-Austria 2007. Director: Dariusz Gajewski, screenplay: Dariusz Gajewski, Roland Gugganig, Radek Knapp, based on the novel by Radek Knapp, cinematography: Wojciech Szepel, music: Michał Litwiniec, Tomasz Sikora, Paweł Czepułkowski, set design: Nikolai Ritter, costumes: Monika Buttinger, editing: Jarosław Barzan, sound: Bettina Mazakarini. Cast: Łukasz Garlicki (Waldemar), Andrzej Grabowski (Mr. Kuka), Anna Przybylska (Ala), Mirosław Zbrojewicz (Arnold), Łukasz Simlat (Dres), Krzysztof Stroiński (priest), Tomasz Karolak (Mirek), August Diehl (Lothar), Branko Samarovski (Bernstein), Nadia Cameron Blakey (Irina), Krista Stadler (Ms. Simacek). Production: Opus Film, Prisma Film, TVP, ORF, co-financed by: Polish Film Institute, Vienna Film Fund, Eurimage, distribution: Fundacja Film Polski. Length 94 min. Released on 21 November 2008.
Author: Konrad J. Zarębski, November 2008
Awards:
- 2008 - Acting Award for Łukasz Garlicki at the film festival "The East and the West: Classics and Avant-garde" in Orenburg.