Opowieści z chłodni
2011 · 26m · Pologne
Directed by Grzegorz Jaroszuk
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, romance
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, tender
Two supermarket employees voted “worst employees of the month” for the third time running are ordered by their boss to find a purpose in life within two days, and they enter a television show searching for the unhappiest person alive as feelings slowly thaw between them.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be a quirky romcom about misfits, but Jaroszuk actually makes something stranger—a film that uses a TV show within the film as a hall of mirrors for examining despair, and half the time you're not sure if the tenderness is ironic or genuine, which is exactly when it stops being safe.
A formally composed chamber piece that echoes the Eastern European tradition of using institutional spaces (supermarket, television studio) as moral laboratories; the restraint in the editing and the deliberate pacing suggest a filmmaker aware of the lineage between Kieślowski and contemporary art cinema.
The decision to run the entire emotional arc through the framing of a televised competition for unhappiness—rather than just *being* unhappy—creates this perfect formal constraint where intimacy can only happen in the margins, and that structural choice is what makes the small moments between the two employees land with such weight.
Reviews
De cette même sensation thermique contradictoire procède le court métrage « Récits de chambre froide » écrit et réalisé par Grzegorz Jaroszuk... le film relate la naissance des sentiments chez deux individus complètement paumés, employés dans un supermarché où les réfrigérateurs ne servent pas seulement à garder les aliments au frais. Décrivant des situations grotesques, le cinéaste éclaire la dépression ambiante du monde du travail, animé d'une conscience épatante des cadrages et d'une ironie jubilatoire.