The cinematic biography of the Polish Olympic boxing champion is an impressive and well-produced story, but lacking in tension and lost in a flurry of irrelevant plots.
Xawery Żuławski’s film is like its protagonist – it suffers from an excess of stimuli. He dribbles away his time instead of focusing on what is most important. And while it has the spark and some charm, at the same time it turns out to be disappointingly uninteresting.
We meet Jerzy Kulej when he steps into the ring to fight for the Olympic gold in Tokyo, after which, buoyed by his championship fame, he returns to Poland to devote himself to the routine of everyday married life. Kulej (Tomasz Włosok) is a bon vivant, the world’s best boxer and a star of Warsaw’s dance parties. Although he likes to drink and his shady dealings with illegal bookmakers draw the attention of the communist regime’s police (he himself officially serves in the militia), none of these things can divert him from the road to further sporting success. Family life, on the other hand, proves to be a greater challenge. All thanks to Helena (Michalina Olszańska), the boxer’s beautiful wife, who, although she has abandoned her university plans for him, refuses to accept the fate of a housewife.
In the story of Jerzy Kulej’s life and career, Xawery Żuławski and his co-screenwriter Rafał Lipski focus from the beginning on showing the titular two sides of the medal (as the Polish version of the film is titled Kulej: Two Sides of the Medal), so that we learn about the fate of the brilliant boxer from the point of view of both the athlete himself and his wife. It is the love story that drives Żuławski’s film and keeps us engaged in its plot. Kulej’s problem is that the screenwriters follow a succession of colourful anecdotes from the athlete’s life, instead of focusing on deepening the –well-functioning, after all – main plot. The story of the Kulej marriage is thus bogged down by an onslaught of side plots, and the scenes multiply endlessly, ultimately making the film last almost two and a half hours. Żuławski finds room here for stories about March 1968 and the antisemitic campaign of the Gomułka era, about illegal bookmakers setting up boxing matches, about Kulej, who hits the bottle too often, and about Helena, whose fidelity is tested by her acquaintanceship with a gallant militiaman (Tomasz Kot). When the filmmakers add the Holocaust theme, it becomes clear that the authors are trying to put too many ingredients into this cinematic borscht.
All this makes Kulej an incoherent film – also stylistically. Time and again, a sports drama and a love story have to fight with a farce, a dance film (long and unnecessary dance sequences) and a slapstick comedy, while the scenes shot in the flat of the character played by Tomasz Kot vividly evoke associations with James Bond antagonists.
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A still from the film Kulej: All That Glitters Isn't Gold, dir. Xawery Żuławski, 2024, photo: Grzegorz Press Watchout Studio/Next Film
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The stylistic diversity is reflected in the cinematography of Marian Prokop, who, together with Żuławski, creates an impressive mosaic in which classically filmed shots are combined with newsreel-style images. And although Kulej is a brilliantly realised film and told with panache, the cinematic story suffers from its aesthetic and plot excess and loses tension for long stretches. In the flurry of events, the filmmakers fail to deepen the most important themes (alcoholism, for example, is shown here as an innocent game), so they lack sufficient dramatic force.
Żuławski’s film, however, is saved by its acting performances. Tomasz Włosok is seductive, doing his best to make the character of Kulej as interesting as possible, and his acting talent and on-screen charisma make the boxing champion really come alive on screen. Michalina Olszańska, his partner, also does quite well. Her Helena has sensuality, subtlety, but also inner turmoil and dilemmas, the weight of which Olszańska is able to convey on screen. There are, in fact, more successful creations here – Bartosz Gelner and Konrad Eleryk are entertaining as the Warsaw bookies, and Andrzej Chyra’s ‘Papa’ Stamm steals the film as the ironic observer and sage playing his own game with his unruly protégé. It is even more of a pity that the excellent acting performances are drowned in a plethora of unnecessary scenes and anecdotes that distract from them, making Kulej a surprisingly lukewarm film spectacle.
- Kulej: All That Glitters Isn't Gold. Directed by: Xawery Żuławski. Screenplay: Rafał Lipski, Xawery Żuławski. Cinematography: Marian Prokop. Editing: Wojtek Włodarski. Production design: Marta Skajnowska. Costumes: Anna Englert. Music: Jan Komar, Mikołaj Majkusiak. Starring: Tomasz Włosok, Michalina Olszańska, Tomasz Kot, Andrzej Chyra.
