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Ferdydurke (30 Door Key) Region 2, PAL

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30 Door Key is an adaptation of Witold Gombrowicz's novel Ferdyduke directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. Ferdyduke ranks among the best known novels in Poland today and is considered a classic. My initial reaction to the movie was that it was absolutely bizarre or complete rubbish. It is one of those movies that truly has no grounding in reality. Elements of the movie just do not make any rational sense. However, once I got past that, the movie grew on me. By the end, I have to say I even enjoyed it and took some appreciation to the insanity it presented.

The story begins with a 30 year old man named Joey being visited by an old teacher. Professor Pimco criticizes Joey's books and takes him back to school so that he can be helped. Having to relive one's school days is the stuff of a bad dream but no one seems to think anything odd of it. But those at the school are more than a little odd themselves. For example, they have a fight with each other not with their firsts but by having a competition making faces.

His time there isn't all torture as he is forced to live with a family that has an 18-year-old schoolgirl named Zoo. The next major segment takes a very different turn when Joey goes to live with his Aunt and Uncle for a while. I will save the suspense and not get into any more details other than to say things change drastically and suddenly. The surrealism is laid thickly so this may annoy those who expect a world based on some sense of common agreement.

The story takes place in 1939 and there are references to the upcoming war scattered throughout the entire film. It gives it an odd feeling of this impending doom lurking around the corner. Although the movie is written and directed by Poles, I would not really label this a Polish movie (but it does have a slight Polish feel to it). In addition to the film being in English, it has an international cast, but also includes a number of Polish actors such as Artur Zmijewski and Zbigniew Zamachowski. I guess if you want to describe Ferdyduke very simply, one could say it is artistic.

About the novel:
Ferdydurke is a novel by the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, published in 1937. Considered a masterpiece of European modernism, Ferdydurke was published at an inopportune moment. World War II, Soviet Union's imposition of a communist regime in Poland and the author's decades of exile in Argentina nearly erased public awareness of a novel that remains a singularly strange exploration of identity and cultural and political mores. In this darkly humorous story, Joey Kowalski describes his transformation from a 30-year-old man into a teenage boy. Kowalski's exploits are comic and erotic -- for this is a modernism closer to Dada and the Marx brothers than to the elevated tones of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound -- but also carry a subtle undertone of philosophical seriousness.
Gombrowicz is interested in identity and the way time and circumstance, history and place impose form on people's lives. The book itself is a parody of common literary forms in prewar Polish literature - an introspective, almost Proustian monologue transitions into a schoolboy memoir, then abruptly becomes a story of intergenerational struggle before finishing up as a "socially conscious" tale of life in a country manor. At each transition point there is a general brawl, a moment of escape, followed by a descent back into rigid form. Gombrowicz weaves into the book his theme that immaturity is the force behind our creative endeavors, but he's also clear that there's no getting away from this relentless, normalizing force.

Gombrowicz himself wrote of his novel that it is not "... a satire on some social class, nor a nihilistic attack on culture... We live in an era of violent changes, of accelerated development, in which settled forms are breaking under life's pressure... The need to find a form for what is yet immature, uncrystalized and underdeveloped, as well as the groan at the impossibility of such a postulate -- this is the chief excitement of my book."

About the director:
Jerzy Yurek Skolimowski (born May 5, 1938) is a Polish film director, screenwriter, dramatist and actor. A graduate of the prestigious Polish Film School in Lódz, Skolimowski has directed more than twenty films since his 1960 début Oko wykol (The Menacing Eye). He now lives in Los Angeles where he paints in a figurative, expressionist mode and acts occasionally in films.

Skolimowski was born in Lódz, Poland, the son of Maria (née Postnikoff) and Stanislau Skolimowski, an architect. He often recognized indications in his work to a childhood ineradicably scarred by the War. As a small child he witnessed the brutalities of war, even rescued from the rubble of a bombed-out house in Warsaw. His father, a member of the Polish Resistance, was executed by the Nazis. His mother hid a Jewish family in the house and Skolimowski recalls being required to take candy from the Nazis to maintain appearances.

Skolimowski was considered as a trouble maker at school as he was the origin of many harmless jokes which angered the authorities. At college he studied ethnography, history and literature and took up boxing, which was also the subject of a feature-length documentary, his first significant film. Skolimowski's interest in jazz and association with composer Krzysztof Komeda brought him into contact with actor Zbigniew Cybulski and directors Andrzej Munk and Roman Polanski.

In his early twenties Skolimowski was already a writer, having published several books of poems, short stories and a play. Soon he met Andrzej Wajda, the leading director of the then dominant 'Polish school' and twelve years Skolimowski's senior, who has showed him a script for a film about youth written by Jerzy Andrzejewski, the author of the novel Ashes and Diamonds. Skolimowski was not impressed and dismissed the script. However in response to a challenge by Wajda, he produced his own version which became a basis for the finished film, The Innocent Sorcerers (1960), directed by Wajda with Skolimowski playing a boxer. Skolimowski enrolled in the Lódz Film School with the intention of avoiding the long apprenticeship required before graduating to feature film direction. He used the film stock available to him for student exercises, and with initial advice from Andrzej Munk, he filmed over several years in such a way that the sequences cut together into a feature. While scoring poorly in course work Skolimowski had a finished feature by the end of the course.

Skolimowsi then collaborated with Polanski, writing the dialogue for the script of Knife in the Water (1962).

Between 1964 and 1984 he completed six semi-autobiographical features: Rysopis, Walkover, Barrier (1966), Hands Up! (completed 1967, released 1981), Moonlighting (GB 1982) and Success is the Best Revenge, a segment in Dialog and two other features Le Départ (1967) and Deep End based on his original screenplays.

While living and working in many countries, he also completed another six relatively big budget productions, including four international co-productions, between 1970 and 1992 (The Adventures of Gerard, King, Queen, Knave, The Shout, The Lightship, Torrents of Spring and Ferdydurke), all distinctly bearing Skolimowski's signature.

Skolimowski has said that he makes films to please himself. After Barrier he left Poland to make Le Départ in Belgium in French. According to him Le Départ was a light film rather than a comedy, "does not have the serious layers that I like in my work." Skolimowski returned to Poland to make Hands Up!, the third film of the Andrzej trilogy and the fourth of his Polish sextet. Between Hands Up! and his next feature, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Gerard (1970), Skolimowski contributed a story to a Czech-produced portmanteau film, Dialóg 20-40-60 (1968), in which three different directors (with Zbynek Brynych and Peter Solan) each devised their own story using identical dialogue even though the central characters in each section are separated in age by twenty years. Skolimowski's segment, "The Twenty Year Olds", would seem to be an extension of Le Départ with Jean-Pierre Léaud playing opposite Skolimowski's wife Joanna Szcerbic.

Deep End (1970) was Skolimowski's second non-Polish feature to be based on his own original screenplay. The movie with a coming of age storyline bears distinctive thematic similarities to Le Départ. Deep End was a promising film yet it was poorly handled by the studio. His films The Shout (1978) and Moonlighting (1982) became critical successes, with Moonlighting, made in the UK, the fifth of his Polish sextet, critically and commercially his most successful film.

The Lightship, Skolimowski's first US production, was adapted from a novella by the German writer Siegfried Lenz. Set on a US coastguard ship it was filmed in the North Sea. It is suspended between psychological duel with a doppelgänger theme and a pure performance piece within the stage-like confines of the lightship. However, even though receiving the best film award at the Venice Film Festival, The Lightship had only a very limited release. Torrents of Spring (1989), adapted from a semi-autobiographical novella by the Russian Ivan Turgenev, was a big budget European co-production starring Timothy Hutton, Nastassja Kinski and Valeria Golino. It could be considered as Skolimowski's most impersonal 'generic' film, the only real departure from his expressed interest in making films only to please himself.

Skolimowski is also an actor, having appeared as Colonel Chaikov, a ruthless yet composed KGB colonel, in White Nights (1985) and Uncle Stepan, a Russian expatriate in Eastern Promises (2007), among other roles.