Teddy Bear

Ryszard Ochódzki is the head of a sports club and the club's money sits in an account. The account is in London. The wife he is divorcing is the other signatory and she has half his passport. He discovers at the border that his passport is incomplete. He cannot get a new one, because she will get there first. He finds a solution: he will find a man who looks like him and take out a passport in that man's name. He finds one. Then it tangles; the double wants to live his own life and the two sides collide. Stanisław Bareja directs. Stanisław Tym plays Ochódzki; Barbara Burska and Krzysztof Kowalewski are in the cast. It is a Polish production, made in 1981. The film became a cult in Poland; its lines passed into everyday speech and are still repeated. The matter it treats is bureaucracy; the comedy comes out of shortages, queues and institutions that do not work. To get past the censor the film built its story on a swindler; the criticism of the system runs in the background. The narrative is episodic; the scenes stand as jokes on their own and some have nothing to do with the story. Bareja was known for films of this kind and the official critics of the period did not take him seriously. Some scenes show the real shortages of the time directly. Its limit is accessibility; the jokes depend on the language and the period and the context is missing from outside. Who it is for: viewers who like Polish comedy and satire from the Eastern bloc. Who it is not for: it is local, episodic, and the ending scattered.