The great documentarian Molly Dineen once said her preferred subject was “anything British that’s dying”. Łukasz Kowalski’s debut film The Pawnshop, presented as part of the 2023 Kinoteka festival of Polish cinema, shows that this formula works for anything Polish as well. It’s set almost entirely within the four walls of its titular establishment, run by a married couple called Jola and Wiesiek. Yet the presence of the outside world is constantly felt. Jola and Wiesiek’s shop is in Bytom, a former mining town now suffering mass unemployment. The desperation can be felt in Wiesiek’s increasingly all-out attempts to promote his business, as well as the sudden emotional outbursts from staff and customers alike.
The Pawnshop has been billed as a documentary comedy in the vein of American Movie or Kim Hopkins’s recent, wonderful A Bunch of Amateurs. There are, certainly, extremely funny moments. The film opens with Wiesiek on the phone to a dissatisfied customer, defending his merchandise in extremely quotable terms: “My blender was fully functional! I have witnesses!” There is also a touch of Open All Hours in Jola’s battle with an apparently un-closeable till, and Jola herself is an incredibly memorable character. You’d expect somebody working in a pawnshop to dress down, if only to avoid intimidating their poorer customers, but Jola is rarely seen without a huge fur coat that looks like it’s eating her alive. In the end, though, it’s the sadness that lingers, and Kowalski structures the film to bring it out. When a boiler repairman uses a blowtorch, Jola says it reminds her of the flame from the factory nearby with an unmistakable wistful tone in her voice. A few scenes later, Kowalski includes footage of that exact same flame, a symbol of the industry that’s slowly leaving Bytom.
If The Pawnshop is anything to go by, this kind of small-scale observational documentary film-making isn’t dead yet.
It’s a very carefully structured film; that opening shot of Wiesiek defending the honour of his blender comes back in truncated form near the end, revealing that it was actually a flash-forward to the film’s conclusion. Some people find this a slightly questionable way to talk about documentaries: if the structure is too visible there’s a suspicion that the action isn’t genuine. Stylistically, The Pawnshop reminded me of Maite Alberdi’s Oscar-nominated The Mole Agent, which some critics said felt more like a fictional drama than a documentary. I suspect anyone who’s edited a film will be able to work out how Alberdi managed to cut genuine footage together to give the impression of multiple cameras, and the same goes for Kowalski. But it’s strange that direct or fly-on-the-wall cinema, a type of film-making that once prided itself on rough edges, is so slick nowadays.
Does it matter? Not an awful lot. Kowalski is clearly aware that making his film too glossy would clash with the subject matter, and when The Pawnshop needs to be raw it can certainly be raw. The subjects have clearly granted the director full access, and he captures some remarkably candid footage as a result. There’s a particularly painful scene where Wiesiek laments that Jola has “this consumerist attitude, money money money […] the feelings are long gone”. But Kowalski also reveals enough of Jola to show that this isn’t the complete picture, that underneath her enormous fur coat there’s a big, beating heart.
The Pawnshop‘s humour is extremely dry, as Eastern European humour tends to be, and it can sometimes throw characters at you without much set-up and expect you to keep up. I did sometimes wish Kowalski had broken his observational style to provide some brief interviews or voiceover as a guide – but then, this might have brought The Pawnshop too close to reality TV, a form that has regrettably all but colonised the space where these quiet little workplace documentaries used to exist. If The Pawnshop is anything to go by, this kind of small-scale observational documentary film-making isn’t dead yet.
The Pawnshop features as part of the Kinoteka Polish Film Festival 2023 which place 9 March – 27 April across venues in London
For more details on Kinoteka
