The Wedding

This latest release by the Polish Connection – who organise British theatrical windows for recent(-ish) Polish box-office hits – is a black comedy made back in 2004, a microcosmic portrait of small-town venality, gluttony and criminal and moral corruption so egregious it achieves a kind of confessional grace. Set over the increasingly drunken hours – or is it days? – of a wedding ceremony and reception, it’s held together by a stand-out performance by Marian Dziendziel as the unsavoury, scheming but somehow noblely indefatigable father of the shot-gun bride (Tamara Arciuch), a man ‘so greedy, he’d eat his own shit’, according to one guest. There’s quite a lot of shit, in both literal and metaphorical form, to contend with in this minor, minority film, but its deadpan concatenation of clichés – from the disgruntled band, an inconvenient death, trigger-happy gangsters – is elevated by writer-director Wojtek Smarzowki’s satisfyingly efficient orchestation and quickening sense of pace and redeemed by his chaste, nicely undemonstative and non-judgmental directorial gaze.