CONTRACT Movie Review

When a bride abandons her groom at the altar, the assembled wedding guests decide that they can't let a little problem like that interrupt the festivities. The resulting two-day wedding party encompasses every imaginable kind of comedy, scandal, insult, and humiliation as the throng turns into a mob and from there takes on an uncontrollable, intimidating life of its own. In this and other films by Poland's enormously talented Krzysztof Zanussi, a nation's precarious and tumultuous political realities are illustrated in startlingly imaginative metaphorical situations that have the grace and verve of modern, cinematic Aesop's fables. As with so many film artists who've had to produce their work under the oppressive eye of the political censor—before, during, and after production—Zanussi has wittily made the most of his situation by scoring his points in what appears at first glance to be a decidedly non-political story. The films that directors like Zanussi, Andrej Wajda, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Krzysztof Kieslowski created in the Poland of the 1970s and 1980s were certainly influential cinematically, yet their political impact was such that they were an integral part of the sweeping changes that reshaped the world in the 1990s. If that weren't enough, it should also be noted that Contract is a very funny picture. With Leslie Caron and the extraordinary Maja Komorowska.

NEXT STOP … The Constant Factor, A Wedding, The Exterminating Angel

1980 111m/C PL Maja Komorowska, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Magda Jaroszowna, Leslie Caron, Ignacy Machowski; D: Krzysztof Zanussi; W: Krzysztof Zanussi; C: Slawomir Idziak; M: Wojciech Kilar. VHS FCT