Nicholas wrote:The film opened across England and Scotland in Cineworld multiplexes in both 3-D and 2-D versions after a big premiere in London s West End attended by Greta Scacchi and Nickolas Grace and a dozen UK directors such as Mike Sarne and Tony Palmer, as well as the legendary Jerzy Hoffman and some of the Polish cast and producers.
...not to mention yours truly. In fact, Mike Sarne acted as MC - a slightly odd choice given that he hadn't seen the film beforehand and his only connection with Polish cinema was that he was best mates with Polanski and Skolimowski in the 1960s.
This must be the first time any foreign-language film has been released with sub titles into multiplex screens
You're parroting the distributor's press release, and it simply isn't true: I myself worked on multiplex releases of subtitled films twenty years ago (I vividly remember
Delicatessen being such an unexpected hit that we had to scramble to get new 35mm prints made to meet demand from multiplex cinemas), and nearly
sixty years ago the French-language
The Wages of Fear became a surprise hit on the Rank circuit. True, this was before the term 'multiplex' had been coined, but it was the exact equivalent.
Mind you, this almost certainly is the first time a
Polish-language film has been given a UK multiplex release - maybe that's what they meant to say, but it got lost in translation?
and apparently it is paying off thanks to the number of Polish in the UK as the film has performed better than any film in the opening weekend after Lion King re-issue and Johnny English Reborn.
"Performed better" is a highly loaded term, as the film didn't make the UK top ten - in fact, its gross of £87,688 is less than a third of that notched up by number 10, and a minuscule fraction of the £2,746,763 grossed by
The Lion King and the nearly £5 million managed by
Johnny English Reborn.
What I suspect you mean is that because of its relatively limited number of screens (21), its
average take per screen was higher than any new film opening last week apart from those two.
To be fair, £4,176 per screen is nothing to be ashamed of (especially not for a foreign-language film with next to no promotion outside Polish communities - it wasn't press-shown, and my
Sight & Sound review was commissioned as I was literally round the corner from the world premiere, as the reviews editor had only just spotted that it was opening - I had to pop into WHSmiths to buy a notebook and pen!), but it's not quite the Disney-challenging megahit that you're implying.
maybe it is old-fashioned in its style ,but it is spectacular and it is a decent telling of a page of history that was never taught in Polish schools (thanks to the Russian Communists I guess) and certainly not in UK schools.
True, but that's one of the problems I had with it - the historical background is fascinating, but nowhere near enough makes it into the film. In real life Józef Piłsudski was one of the most enthrallingly mercurial figures in Polish history, but he's not that far removed from
Blackadder's General Melchett here - with no disrespect to Daniel Olbrychski and his spectacular moustache, who made the best of a pretty hackneyed script. And even the love story fizzled out by the halfway mark, largely because Borys Szyc has next to nothing to do after fleeing the Chekists - his entire conversation with the Cossacks is almost a model of how not to shoehorn politics into conversation if you want the latter to sound as though it was conducted by actual human beings.
Unusually the 3-D actually works and is an integral part of the filming and not added afterwards as in most of the Hollywood movies (such as precisely The Lion King!!)
You can rest assured that in my upcoming review I single out cinematographer Sławomir Idziak for particular praise. I also make it clear that the film is enormously entertaining - but that's despite the script, not because of it.