Shameless Directed by Filip Marczewski / Poland, 2012, East of the West Competition - KVIFF

Sex is confined to one not-so-explicit scene, and the whole film is much less torrid than you could expect. Sorry you voyeurs reading this, but that’s what film posters, titles and press agents are for…

The plot revolves around restless 18 years old Tadzik, intensely played by Mateusz Kościukiewicz, and his two summer relationships: on one side a turbulent attraction for his elder half-sister Anka, a beautiful, emotionally unsettled Agnieszka Grochowska, and on the other side a newly born friendship with local Romany girl Irmina, débutante Anna Próchniak, who falls in love with him.

This painful coming of age story is settled in a conflictive social environment - where a neo-nazi group repeatedly attacks a gypsy settlement - and here you have a possible reason of interest for this film: the attempt to merge sentimental drama, the controversial passion of the protagonist, with social drama, the clash of communities. It’s not common to give such melodramatic plots a social scope, maybe Todd Haynes is one of the few successfully walking this path (Far from Heaven and HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce). In Shameless the parallel between the “sick” brother-sister relationship and the anger against the gypsy settlement is surely fascinating. Incest and gypsies are both “dirty”, socially unaccepted in our bourgeois commonsense. But the film doesn’t explore these prejudices too deeply. The ethnic clash setting is fair but not surprising whatsoever, so it threatens to remain an exotic backdrop.

Interestingly, the subject matter comes from a previous short film by the same director, multi-awarded Melodramat, picturing the scandalous love of a young boy for his elder sister. Even compared with the trailer of that shortfilm (www.vimeo.com/24824170), in Shameless the forbidden passion and its emotional consequences are kind of cleaned up: no deep investigation of the protagonist’s obsession, no attempt to visualize his inner projections and conflicts.

Marczewski opts for a naturalistic representation, which helps in keeping narrative tension strong throughout the 80 minutes, along with a solid dramaturgy and powerful acting, but maybe sacrifices the exploration of his characters’ ultimate emotional consequences on the altar of realism.

The protagonist restless search for loving in the “wrong” direction, this blinding addiction that keeps him from seeing his Romany friend’s love, is a very genuine, yet very little shown, human experience: it’s a shame this film isn’t pushing a bit forward in the disclosure of such universal, tragic feeling.

By Sebastiano Pucciarelli