11 MINUTES

Poland, 2015, 81 minutes, Colour.
Richard Dormer, Paulina Chapko, Woiciech Mecwaldowski.
Directed by Jerzy Skolomowski.

11 minutes is a rare film from Polish writer-director Jerzy Skolimoswski who had a significant career over many decades, in his native Poland, making films outside Poland like Deep End in the 1970s and his portrait of Solidarity, Moonlighting in 1980s.

The 11 minutes of the film take place around 5 o’clock in afternoon in busy Warsaw, the film introducing a range of characters, brief sketches, then intercutting them as time moves forward, as they have chance encounters with one another or simply pass one another in the streets.

Thus, the film is able to show a jealous husband and his actress wife and her visit to a sleazy film director, men and women having affairs including a window cleaner, a courier dealing in drugs and his ex-con father selling hotdogs in the street to passers-by including a woman who has custody of a pet dog and four nuns on a day out. There is also a paramedic team trying to get people to hospital on time.

The film and the characters stay in the memory, quite significant for such a brief running time for the film.

1. The title, the 11 minutes around 5 o'clock in the afternoon, for a range of people in Warsaw, ordinary people, cross-section?

2. The climax of the 11 minutes, disaster, deaths? Drama and melodrama?

3. The Warsaw settings, the streets, homes, hotels and corridors, the vendor and the park, building cleaners…? The musical score?

4. The structure of the film, the introduction to each of the characters – as if being filmed on video? The development of their stories? The intercutting of the stories, time going backwards and forwards, characters passing on the streets, coincidences?

5. 11 minutes and fate, interconnections, incidents and accidents?

6. Audience interest in the characters, their stories, sympathies – within the space of 11 minutes of their lives?

7. The jealous husband, the attack on the man who touched his wife, the injury to his eye, the police, the interrogation, his being free? The approach to his wife, her staying with him? Love? His wife’s appointment, the audition and the film? His going to the hotel, kept waiting, going upstairs, in the corridor, the various guests and their trays, the security? His patience, impatience, bashing in the door, seeing his wife, grabbing the director, trying to hold his wife, the security holding him, his having to let go, watching her fall?

8. The director, in the hotel, pretence, phone calls, sleazy, the no disturb sign, receiving the woman, his approach, personal, discussions about the film, the role, prostitution, nudity, the woman’s response, her caution, wariness, needing air, her collapse, the director holding her, the husband barging in, falling out the window, the director falling to his death, hitting the stand with the cleaner, their both falling? The wife, holding on, her husband having to let go, her fall and her expression?

9. The window cleaner, his time off, the sexual encounter with the woman, waving at the bus stop? Being hit by the director and falling to his death?

10. The vendor, formerly in prison, selling hotdogs, the nuns buying them, chatting, his serving them up, other customers, the woman with the dog? Talking about his son’s marriage? Wanting to meet his son? The son, the affair with a woman, getting out before the husband returned? His courier work? Drug deliveries? Going into the building, upstairs? Meeting his father? The bus, the accident and his death?

11. The young man, the note for his mother, going for the robbery, getting into the store, seeing the man hanging, his backing out? At the river, the painter and his work and the blot? In the bus, communicating? The bus accident and their deaths?

12. The woman with the dog, the breakup with her partner, her wandering the streets, the hotdogs? Her death?

13. The nuns, the outing, the hotdogs, in the bus, accident victims?

14. The paramedic team, the doctor, her arrival, the assistants, the man obstructing them, having to clear away the doors on the staircase, getting into the room, the pregnant woman, the old man, the ambulance hurrying, involved in the crash?

15. The amount of characterisation and meaning in just 80 minutes?