Writer and Director: Damian Kocur
This austere Polish drama could be the pick of this year’s BFI Festival. Its story of a piano prodigy going home to a housing estate for the summer barely touches on queerness and instead is an unsettling examination of racism, masculinity and broken dreams. With an art-house aesthetic to every long shot and a rumbling soundtrack, Damian Kocur’s film is bone-chilling.
In Poland when people move to a new house, they are welcomed by their neighbours with bread and salt. Tymek wonders if the old tradition has been extended to the staff of the new kebab restaurant that opened while he has been in Warsaw studying the piano after winning a scholarship. It’s a popular space mainly patronised by those in their late teens or early 20s. They can get beer there too as long as they order food.
The kebab shop is the focus of Kocur’s film but we get to know little of the two Arab men who work there, and we only see clearly the face of one, albeit briefly. For the main part, Kocur keeps the camera firmly on Tymek’s face as he eases back into a daily routine of doing nothing amongst his friends who belong to the world of the left behinds. Tymek’s face is mostly inscrutable, but we sense his discomfort in the working-class society of which, presumably, he is no longer a part.
His friends haven’t done much since he last saw them. His younger brother, who has the potential to be a great pianist too, has stopped practising. Dave, whose father was an alcoholic, is planning to move to Norway while the girl Tymek picks up with has plans to stay in the area and sell CBD products. Tymek is surprised that no one really wants to leave and that his friends are happy just hanging out, smoking weed and drinking beer.
But he fits in as well as he can, although he is reluctant to have sex with the girl he hangs out with. He remains silent when the gang hassles the two kebab shop workers with demands for food coloured with racist insults. Sometimes the kebab shop owners shout back, and the tension grows, exacerbated by the fact that we only have glimpses of what is going on as the camera remains squarely on Tymek’s face.
Just once, in a strange dreamlike scene, do we sense that Tymek might have sexual desire for one of the Arab men. But the image of them together is so brief that it is hard to tell whether this is part of Tymek’s imaginative desire or something that really happened. Otherwise, they only have a single conversation in which Tymek finds out the man is called Youssef, which is not so far from the Polish Jósef.
Kocur’s scenes are separated by long blank screens that add to the rising tension of the stifling hot summer. Innocent shots of dirt bike racing or shots of the empty housing estate are accompanied by a single prolonged note rather than the piano-playing that is the film’s main music. Something bad is bound to happen.
Bread and Salt is based on real events, and to make the film even more rooted in reality Kocur has used non-actors in the film. They all do well, bringing a sense of bored hopelessness to their roles. Tymek is played by composer Tymoteusz Bies who expertly conveys his character’s unease at being back home, but at times, when he laughs, perhaps too hard, it seems as if he is as culpable as the rest of his mates. His real-life brother, Jacek Bies, plays his fictional brother, Jaca, whose frustration seeps out whenever he plays the piano. All these young performers ensure that this film is played on a knife edge.
It is incredible that Bread and Salt is Kocur’s first feature and quite rightly it has already won lots of awards. Coldly beautiful, this story of a generation let down by society is nothing short of gripping.
Bread and Salt is screening at BFI Flare Festival 2023 from 15 -26 March.
