User reviews

Judging from the lack of reviews this movie isn't very well known, but it is quite funny. The main character is a con man who seems pathologically driven to take on new identities at the drop of a hat. He then runs scams using the new identity. The movie has a light touch, and though the humor might be a bit dry for some, I found it to be very funny throughout. It seems that some of the scams he runs are facilitated by the vagaries of the communist system that Poland was under at the time, and since the movie came out in 1989 I'm sure it was an intentional critique of a crumbling hierarchy. The funniest sequence is the last one, in which our hero of many names becomes a high-level dignitary until his luck inevitably runs out. Beautifully done.

A Polish comedy from 1989, a period of profound political changes in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland, which took the forefront in the reformist process of the Soviet bloc, in which a coup plotter takes advantage of the ineffectiveness of the communist bureaucratic apparatus and the parallel economy that rages in the country, to carry out his coups.

Although situated temporally in the current time in which it was shot, the argument was based on a real story, which took place at the beginning of the 60s, so, strictly speaking, the criticism is not even made of the evident decadence of the regime, in 1989, but of the system itself, inherited from Stalinism.

However, the most ironic thing is that the reality presented, although located in Polish society at the end of the 80s, could be transposed, with the necessary adaptations, to any country or regime in the world.

There has never been a shortage of scammers and there is no system immune to them. If even Stalinist totalitarianism was unable to prevent fraud, the liberalism and capitalism that followed the fall of communism in Europe, gave it a wide field of action, transforming these eastern countries, which were strongly hierarchical and accustomed to living in a parallel economy, in new authoritarian capitalist regimes, where corruption and nepotism are the rule.

But the West is not far behind, because the discredit of liberal political institutions, motivated precisely by nepotism and corruption, is giving rise to authoritarian populism, which differs little, from the oligarchic models of Eastern Europe.

There is no system that can instill honesty in human beings. Everyone has it, until they lose it at the first worthwhile opportunity. It's all a matter of price.