Stanisław Bareja (1929-1987) was one of his country’s most popular comedy directors. His films were often juicy satires about everyday life and conditions under the People’s Republic – and even more profoundly about Polish mentality generally. Bareja’s definite cult film is Teddy Bear (1981), a rough-edged look at the life of a sports club owner, where contemporary jokes include hanging a huge mascot resembling Mishka of the Moscow Olympics from a helicopter. In the 60s Bareja’s satire was wedded to the musical genre, inside which he created one vivid vision after another (The Marriage of Convenience, 1966, among others). In Adventure with a Song Bareja is at his kindest towards his native country, not least because of the fact that the political climate of 1968 was tighter than it had been for years (the anti-Zionist campaign, student riots, etc.). Instead the barbs are pointed towards West and the capitalist lifestyle, or more exactly towards Polish high hopes about emigration. The film is set in Paris, which makes it a kind of socialist answer to Mamoulian’s Silk Stockings. The structure of the story couldn’t be more familiar: a good girl turns bad in the big city. Charming Pola Raksa plays the winner of a domestic song contest who ambitiously wants to build her career in Paris instead of her home country – and in order to do so, falls step by step down to working in a sleazy strip-tease joint. Some Teuvo Tulio or other melodramatist could have sunk to the lowest depths with this kind of story, but Bareja keeps it airy, light and deliberately campy, and only as a frame for a romantic comedy plot and a series of delightful song and dance numbers. As a musical showcase Przygoda z piosenką is one of the most energetic wannabe-Hollywood experiences ever to have been created on our side of the Atlantic. We have a chorus with lots of stewardesses, a dance number through all the most famous tourist sights of Paris (shot on location), and a man dancing on the walls in Astaire fashion, with a mirror turning into water under his feet like in some Cocteau film! This glorious pop explosion was shot in scope with flashy candy colors by Franciszek Kądziołka.

Petteri Kalliomäki