A Polish comedy from 1988 that won awards at film festivals and has a really good IMDB rating, but most of the few reviews complain that it is not funny and involves toilet humor. What's going on?
I don't speak Polish, so I had to rely on the subtitles. I also didn't grow up in a socialist country, but as someone who grew up in a West German family with contacts to East Germany, it seems I have enough of a cultural affinity to this film to really enjoy it.
The main premise of this film: Hidden in the basement of a Polish library, there is a society of tiny dwarfs, all male, living on the trash of the 'king sized' normal human society. This premise has a lot of potential for funny scenes, and the film makes full use of it. We see ordinary objects such as safety pins and egg slicers in a completely new light.
The dwarfs have certain magic abilities, but that's not very important for the plot. What really matters is the secret 'king size' formula for a potion that enables the dwarfs to temporarily become citizens of the normal world. And meet women! Much like was the case with
Seksmisja (1984) four years earlier (a film that is actually alluded to in a dialog), there is potential for a sex comedy here, which is used only to a very limited extent. The toilet humor that one reviewer objected to similarly is present but is not overdone to the point that it's fair to complain about it.
The film's political dimension is obvious to me, so it must certainly have been obvious to contemporary Polish audiences -- and censors. It is amazing that such a film was already possible at the time. It came out in the year before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The dwarf king suppresses his subjects in much the same well-intentioned style in which socialist governments dealt with their populations. A few subjects get the privilege of temporarily leaving the kingdom and enjoying the wonders of the king sized world. However, if they don't use the trick of drinking a certain capitalist wonder potion, they must return.
The film's allegorical dimension becomes completely transparent when the happy end suddenly turns into a nasty surprise.
