Family Life

Tricked into returning home for the first time in six years, a successful young Polish engineer is forced to decide whether or not to take responsibility for the destructive lifestyle of his estranged, alcoholic father, bitter that the family's wealth has gone, his furniture is being sold, and his grandfather's glass factory is now state-owned. Despite the laconic passivity of Olbrychski's performance as the engineer, Family Life compels attention by its richly detailed evocation of the family's crumbling mansion, its overgrown garden under siege from modern apartment buildings, and the precision with which Zanussi develops the engineer's struggle to accept, and finally to free himself from, the tentacles of his father's capitalist past. A neatly dismissive coda wraps up this taut, supremely well-made example of formal Polish film-making.