The Reverse

In 1952, during the peak of Stalinist terror in communist Poland, an encounter with the secret police changes life for three generations of women in the good-looking, tonally sophisticated The Reverse. Rich with references to Polish culture and cinema history, the genre-juggling feature debut of prize-winning documaker Borys Lankosz is clever, complex and spiked with a special kind of black humor. Prim 30-year-old spinster Sabina works as a poetry editor in a Warsaw publishing house and shares a crowded apartment with her resourceful mother, Irena, and ailing but alert grandmother. Eager for Sabina to marry, the older women put forward a string of unsuitable candidates. But shy Sabina, whose heart flutters at the manly bare chests of soldiers glimpsed in cinema newsreels, finds her own macho admirer seemingly by chance.