LFF 2013: Floating Skyscrapers

Ground-breaking though it is as one of the first gay films to come out of Poland, Tomasz Wasilewski’s Floating Skyscrapers brings home how happy endings on such subjects are hardly to be hoped for in the conservative, Catholic country. Wasilewski’s second feature has real visual style though, with laconic imagery and accomplished performances. It has garnered plentiful festival acclaim already, and opens in the UK in December.

It’s set in an anonymous-feeling city of underpasses and motorways, a largely dark world where interiors are cramped, like the flat that Kuba (Mateusz Banasiuk, below right) shares with his demanding mother (Katarzyna Herman) and longterm, long-suffering girlfriend Sylwia (Marta Nieradkiewicz), who interact uneasily. A potential champion swimmer, his natural milieu is the pool (nice cinematography there) where he trains, also finding sexual gratification of a different kind in its uneasy neon surroundings.

He resists acknowledging that side of his nature until a chance meeting with student Michal (Bartosz Gelner, with Banasiuk, main picture above), whose horizons stretch wider than those of his new friend, and whose confidence is attractive. Quite how that friendship grows into sexual fascination, and then proclaimed love, is something Wasilewski’s script never quite explains fully. But grow it does, until Kuba’s practically ignoring Sylwia and the obligations of home, and his dedication to sport suffers.

Michal’s family atmosphere is freer – he has no secrets from his mother, and comes out to all at a family meal, admittedly with minimal reaction from his father. Any hopes of reaching for the heights suggested by the film's evocative title are brutally dashed out on a concrete floor by its denouement. Floating Skyscrapers nevertheless has filmic horizons wider than those director Wasilewski allows his characters.