“It Takes a Village” is a frustrating Polish farce that opens its arms to a world of comic possibilities only to let them all slip through its fingers, one by one.
Titled “Podlasie” in Polish, after the region the village of Bodzki is set in, it’s a romantic comedy about pride, last chance romance, country rubes having one over on gullible city slickers and “alien” crop circles.
Every character “type” introduced is a lot less than she or he should be. Every “wacky” twist in the “Let’s pretends aliens are landing” plot falls about six whacks shy of wacky and the few one-liners attempted lose something or nearly everything in translation (in Polish, or dubbed into English, Spanish, etc.).
A lame fake-out-the-audience wedding opens the film, as the young couple that everybody in the village, including the brass band imported for the occasion, rushes to see “the young couple” exchange their vows only to have Oliwka (Anna Szymanczyk) and Kuba (Matuesz Janicki) stand aside as widowed Halina (Anna Seniuk, whose credits date back to the Soviet Empire) and Jan (Artus Barcis) almost take their vows.
The “almost” arrives when Halina gets cold feet. But we don’t buy “I’m about to abandon my widowhood” as her excuse. Something about her pleas to her granddaughter and others — “Help me get OUT of this!” — tell us there’s more going on.
There is. She’s another dupe in the vast Bitcoin pyramid scheme and she’s too embarassed to admit she lost all her money.
After Halina lies to and humiliates Jan at the altar, she scrambles to get cash out of her goat cheese business and farmland, and when her artist-daughter (Joanna Trzepiecinska) shows up, Jan figures out the real reason all this happened and a scheme is hatched.
They’ll pretend aliens are making crop circles, and the notoriety will help Halina sell her cheese and everybody else sell whatever to the gullible “believers” who show up to raise the money to cover her losses.
A teensy little bit of fun is had by the faction we see making the crop circles, Wojkek (Flip Gurlacz) creating the viral “I don’t want to get ABDUCTED by aliens!” videos for his “What the SHOCK?” Youtube channel, the cop (Angelika Cegielska-Swiatek) out to expose “the hoaxers” and the priest who tolerates all this scamming and distracting from his Holy Mother Visitation (long ago) Shrine.
But there’s no edge to any of this. The stakes are low and treated as no big deal. It’s not cultural differences that hold the film back, as there have been Polish comedies on Netflix that translate to laughs west of the former Iron Curtain.
The performances are broad, but not remotely broad enough. The “colorful” local characters are colorless.
Worst of all, if a lot of people watch this debacle, you know Netflix will turn that intellectual property into Italian, Spanish and Filipino versions of “It Takes a Village.”
Rating: TV-14
Cast: Anna Seniuk, Artur Barcis, Joanna Trzepiecinska,
Filip Gurlacz, Mateusz Janicki and
Angelika Cegielska-Swiatek
Credits: Directed by
Lukasz Kosmicki, scripted by Katarzyna Frankowska and Katarzyna Golenia. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:37
