KILL IT AND LEAVE THIS TOWN Film Review – Existential Loneliness and Alienation

A monochromatic rendering of a bleak, industrial Polish city opens this animated film. Tall smoke stacks spew dark soot day and night. Buildings sit in neat rows on deserted streets.  A tram, or what Americans would call a trolley or train, comes into the city at regular intervals. It appears to be the only way in or out of this dismal landscape.

Lights from windows and a single streetlight are yellow…

A curious, pink neon sign in the outline of an elephant is on top of a building a few blocks away. These lights are like a handful of stars in a landscape of empty sky.

There is no warmth here, only a feeling of existential loneliness and alienation.

Kill It and Leave This Town immerses us in the personal memories of filmmaker Marius Wilczynski and his childhood behind the Iron Curtain. It’s of dreams and fantasies coupled with the weary, daily grind of life in Poland.  During this same 60’s to 80’s timeframe –just as R. Crumb was drawing women in a way that he objectified their sexuality, with big, bouncing breasts and nipples—Wilczynski, is drawing women with big breasts and nipples too, but here their nipples are pointed in a dagger-like scary or threatening way.

Scenes unfold to convey a harsh life.  When a rude, disaffected shop keeper closing up his store tells a frantic woman who needs bread before her tram leaves to get the bread herself and lay down exact change, we see live fish are in a bucket of water on the counter gasping for air. Suddenly, people are swimming among the fishes from side to side, furiously trying to tread water just to survive.

Kill It and Leave This Town Uses a Jagged-Style

The animations in Kill It and Leave This Town are inked crudely, in a jagged-style. They look like they were drawn and made into cut outs and manipulated through animation to show movement.  Blackbirds peck the eyes out of a severed head with deep, red colored blood flowing out of the eye sockets.  Line drawings capture nuances such as when a woman takes a frayed thread through the needle and sews methodically, there is precision and movement with every stitch.

Driving Guitar Soundtrack

Sound plays a major role in this animation. Tadeusz Nalepa’s driving guitar soundtrack from the same time period as the film takes place, is powerful and feels like blood pulsing through the body of the story, in this writer’s opinion. The lyrics are poetry mirroring daily life. While the Blues music provides passion and a refuge, the voices inflict emotional suffering.—a child crying, an old woman’s weak and lonely words or the nonchalant dialogue of a morgue assistant placing plugs in the orifices of a dead body.

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Run time: 88 minutes

CREATIVE TEAM
Director: Marius Wilczynski
Actors: Anja Rubik, Tadeusz Nalepa, Andrzej Wajda, Anna Dymna
Writer: Marius Wilczynski
Music: Tadeusz Nalepa

For more information on the film and how to screen it visit the Kill It and Leave This Town website.

Images courtesy of Kill It And Leave This Town.