The Big Animal
Milestone, $29.95
Parables are a thorny thicket for filmmakers. Too light a touch, and your movie will fall into fairy-tale sentimentality; come on too heavy, however, and it will drown in the murky waters of its message, leaving trifles like story and character floating out to sea. The Big Animal, which tells the story of small-town Polish bank clerk Zygmunt Sawicki, his loyal wife, and the camel they find one evening in their front yard (stop me if you’ve heard this one before), treads this dodgy terrain ably, turning a tale about the bond between a man and his beast into an allegory of fiercest humanity.Written by legendary Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski (The Decalogue, the Three Colors trilogy) and directed by longtime Polish actor and Kieslowski collaborator Jerzy Stuhr, The Big Animal is a deadpan black comedy about the imaginative vitality of the individual struggling to survive against suffocating group thought – an issue long prominent in Polish film and one close to the hearts of Kieslowski and Stuhr, who lived and worked under communist rule for most of their lives. Stuhr digs deep into the role of Sawicki, illuminating all sides of an ordinary man fighting against the mockery and fear of his neighbors and the petty bureaucracy they depend on to keep everyone safe and similar – all the while playing straight man to a dromedary. Over the course of the film’s short 72 minutes, as the weight of that bureaucracy comes crashing down on him, Sawicki grows into a hero of the queerest kind: proud and stubborn but essentially ignorant of the symbolic value of the war he’s waging. He doesn’t want to change the world; he just wants his camel. As for Stuhr, his television interview in the disc’s bonus features is a fascinating lightning-round history of modern Polish cinema from Andrzej Wajda to Maciej Stuhr, Jerzy’s own son and fellow screen star, and his observations during the making-of documentary show a man of humor and wit with a passion for exposing the dangers of unexamined social leanings.
Also Out Now
The Clay Bird (Milestone, $29.95): Set against the backdrop of civil war in 1960s Pakistan, Tareque Masud’s The Clay Bird has been called one of the most important pictures to come out of the Muslim world, second only to the Turkish Star Wars on most critics’ lists.
The King (Velocity/ThinkFilm, $27.98): Gael García Bernal and William Hurt team up for a Texas-sized tragedy of biblical proportions.
This article appears in November 3 • 2006.