The Grass Is Always Greener

Klier's dour black-and-white feature stars Baka (from Kieslowski's Short Film About Killing) as the gentle but alienated youth who tires of the futility of his eked-out existence in depressed Poland - changing money, fencing cheap stolen goods - and hotfoots it to Berlin while he prepares his emigration plans for the US. The film scores in its documentary-style comparative tour around the low dives and low-lives of the marginals and petty criminals found in the dead-end parts of Warsaw and West Berlin, but suffers overly from miserabilism, muted performances, and the lack of an overall organising perspective.