Nothing Funny

Adaś Miauczyński is a film director looking at his own life from outside: childhood, school, marriage, work, and the inadequacy he feels throughout. It does not run in a straight line. The scenes are ordered the way a person actually remembers, scattered and full of embarrassment. Marek Koterski writes and directs. Cezary Pazura plays Adaś. Adaś Miauczyński does not belong to one film. Koterski used the character across decades, in different films, played by different actors at different ages. What they share is not that they are the same man but that they are the same state of mind. In Poland the figure became something close to a type: educated, restless, permanently angry and turned in on himself. The humour is black and uncomfortable. Funerals, illness, sex and professional failure are handled in the same register, and none of them softened. Koterski's best known film, Dzień świra, continues the same line. Together they form a branch of Polish cinema that exists nowhere else. Who it is for: viewers who follow Polish cinema and autobiographical black comedy. Who it is not for: the humour is deeply tied to the language and the culture, and a good deal of it disappears in subtitles.