#WszystkoGra (Game On) review: Warsaw has seldom looked as romantic

Fine-arts student Zosia (Eliza Rycembel) is a young daredevil mural painter whose best friends keep sketch while she enlivens Warsaw with lovely graffiti. She lives with her mother Roma (Kinga Preis) and grandmother Romy (Stanislawa Celinska) in a beautiful villa that has come under threat from property developers.

Romy has long lost the deeds to the house. Will the women lose their home? And will they want to stay there once Roma finds new love and granny reveals a secret from long ago?

Warsaw has seldom looked as romantic as in Agnieszka Glinska’s warm-hearted, multi-generational comedy. From an Irish perspective, it’s tempting to label this oddly hash-tagged as the Polish Once. Or possibly the Polish Sing Street. As with John Carney’s much-loved oeuvre, street musicians – a conveniently placed trumpeter here, a handy cellist there – provide accompaniment as the main characters pass through the Polish capital’s most attractive tableaux. Attractive choreography, as designed by Veronica Penczynska and Agustin Egurrola, is enacted by students at art college or passers-by at the park.

Let’s qualify our earlier comparison: where Carney’s films are unabashedly boyish, Glinska, an editor best known for her work on (the Angelina Jolie-Pitt-produced) Difret and 11 Minutes, is all about the sisterhood. Equal billing is, accordingly, given to each of the feminine triumvirate as they sing through a Polish pop repertoire with a vaguely angular score.

Though never as left field as something like The Lure, the recent Polish disco-musical-mermaid-horror movie, there are moments when the subtitles prove rather jolting: “The fallow field is sown anew by the farmer/ What a joke!” Hmm. Perhaps something has got lost in the translation?