| Unlike the vast majority of Polish films, ‘The closed circuit’ was financed privately, without any government funding. The director, Ryszard Bugajski, also directed the 1982 film, ‘Interrogation’, which was banned by the then Communist regime, with Bugajski forced to emigrate abroad.
The film is set in the Tricity in 2003, ten years after the end of communism in Poland. The plot, apparently based on the real-life experiences of Kraków businessmen Lech Jerzorny and Paweł Rey, is about three young, talented businessmen who open a high-tech factory. This comes to the attention of the local state ‘mafia’, the local Prosecutor, played by Janusz Gajos, and tax office boss, played by Kasimierz Kaczor, who are both jealous and would like to make money for themselves. We are in Poland, so success must be punished.
Suddenly, and without any apparent warning, the three businessmen are arrested with great brutality by armed and masked anti-terrorist police. They then face a Kafkaesque nightmare of imprisonment with neither cause nor explanation. The message of the film appears to be that it is not possible to run an honest business in Poland. The film ends with the businessmen being invited to set up in Denmark by their Danish partners, in a country which (apparently) rewards rather than penalises talent and success.
The best feature of the film is the superb acting of Janusz Gajos who plays the ‘black character’ in the film, the prosecutor, Andrzej Kostrzewa. He is a man who gained power, position, influence and wealth in former communist times, and still exerts a malign influence in his fiefdom. He is portrayed as a poor husband and father, who hunts wild animals, and generally behaves like a lord without any saving graces whatsoever. He is very ably assisted in his dark plots by his obsequious young assistant Kamil Słodowski, (Wojciech Zołądowicz). The Polish state is portrayed as one big money-extorting racket, with the prosecutors, courts, police, media, government, tax authorities and even the prisons colluding with each other against ordinary citizens.
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