Boys Don't Cry

Kuba is an ordinary young man playing in a small band. His friend Oskar loses at gambling one night and the debt is to the mafia. Kuba is drawn in without meaning to be. Money found in a car, two rival gangs, a policeman and a series of misunderstandings all connect, and everyone chases everyone through the night. Olaf Lubaszenko directs. The cast includes Cezary Pazura, Maciej Stuhr, Michał Milowicz and Katarzyna Figura. It belongs to the wave of gangster comedies in Poland at the end of the nineties; the criminal economy that grew fast after the Soviet period is the shared subject of those films. The shape is the multi strand crime comedy: groups unaware of each other, the same money, and a chain of misunderstandings. That structure was common in western cinema at the time as well. The humour comes from language and types. The characters are stock and the lines stayed in circulation in Poland for a long time; the film became a cult object and is still rewatched. Cezary Pazura was Poland's best known comic actor at the time and his scenes are at the centre. It was a large commercial success and a sequel followed. Who it is for: anyone curious about Eastern European crime comedy of the nineties. Who it is not for: the humour is deeply tied to its language and period, the women are stock, and the narrative scatters in the second half.