Richard J. Brzostek - 11/05/2008 
"Horizontal Landscape" (Pejzaz Horyzontalny) is an entertaining coming of age Polish film from the late 1970s. It has a cast of characters that are believable and likeable. Just as the name of the movie is about the changes that a landscape can take as a forest can be turned into a building made of cement and steel, the people behind it can transform just as fast.
The three young men in their 20s meet on their first day at work and end up moving in together in an apartment. They all came to work for their own reasons: Student, who is a bit on the emotional side and ends up meeting his girl friend at the store; Curley is a bit of a wise guy and ran out of his wife because she nagged him too much; and Tytus, who often wears a straw hat and sings songs while strumming on his autistic guitar. The three don't get along right away and occasionally argue but they end up becoming great friends.
They all work on a construction job together and their work brings them together. Their manager watches them from a tower nicknamed Olympia, thinking of himself as a sort of god. He observes his workers with a telescope and commands them with a loud speaker. Although he helps them at times, he also causes them some problems. They all work together and grow up together too as they face their challenges.
"Horizontal Landscape" is a great story about friendship and becoming an adult. They get into trouble on occasion but pull together to help each other out and can be pretty funny at times too. One of the most appealing parts of this film is that their interactions really pull you in and make you want to watch their drama. |
Chesney Davis - 04/21/2008
In 1978, in communist Poland, the government had full control over every aspect of life, including the business of construction. Kedzior (Wieslaw Wójcik), a man who has left his “nasty wife” to find work; Student (Mieczyslaw Hryniewicz), a college dropout, who runs away from his money hungry father for a more simple life; and the intelligent Tytus (Jaroslaw Kopaczewski), whose brawn and ex-con past sometimes gets the best of him, are friends living and working together in the leading construction district for a boss who thinks he is the almighty. When their narcissistic and verbally abusive foreman gets fired, they try to keep the crew in high spirits and get the job done. Along the way, the three find time to get into lunch counter brawls, nearly get accused of rape for a harmless prank, and for at least one of them, find love. The award winning film reveals the less than trouble-free world of the lower working class in Poland, which unsurprisingly sounds all too familiar: low pay, poor working conditions, layoffs and upper level supervisors who abuse their power. Common findings, no matter what governmental structure is being imposed. Although it is able to fuse both humanity and politics, the film too often slips in and out between a documentary-like examination of the hard-knocks of working class life and the slapstick antics of the three leads. Nevertheless, it does successfully juxtapose a generation downtrodden and jaded by a faulty system with a generation ready for change and tired of conforming.
The disc comes with filmographies of writer/director Janusz Kidawa, Mieczyslaw Hryniewicz, and Jaroslaw Kopaczewski. |
| Click to view All Reviews |
