Like many of Bareja’s other films from the 1970s and 1980s, a summary of the plot does not do justice to how well Brunet Will Call mocks Polish reality. Bareja shows a world where a brake cable for a car can only be found at the butcher’s shop, where militia admonish pedestrians by shouting through a megaphone: ‘Pedestrians! Stick to the zebra crossing!’, where the TV has to be turned off when the most popular show is on because the increased power consumption can cause the TV to break.
One particular scene set in a museum is a masterpiece. The exhibition consists of alcohol bottles from different centuries to illustrate the phenomenon of the nobility making peasants dependant on alcohol. A teacher guiding pupils through the room has a problem with the last, unsigned object – as it turns out, it is not part of the exhibition, but a bottle used by the cleaner to water the plants. This scene shows the essence of Bareja’s humour – not only aimed at the communist regime, but also distanced from all the slogans and institutions. In this particular case, the director showed that even a worthless object placed in a museum space gains the status of an art piece.
From today’s perspective, what’s most interesting in Brunet Will Call is not its socio-political humour but the experiments with the conventions of crime films. Bareja uses the aesthetics of different genres and entwines cabaret-like scenes with shots that preserve the poetics of a crime flick. In the culminating moment, in order to imitate horror films he makes use of a dark lighting, cold blue colours, and wide-angle lenses that distort the image. Such conventions are, however, broke down and ridiculed by the director. Bareja further plays with the convention of crime films – Michał finds out the identity of the villain by sheer chance, not through the power of deduction and logical reasoning.
Even though Brunet Will Call contains a few unnecessary scenes and its humour is very sophisticated, the comedy is one of the most humorous of Bareja’s films. It is an interesting example of self-aware, ironic popular cinema from the era of the communist regime. It could be even said that its experiments with conventions make Brunet Will Call similar to late post-modernist works.