‘Corpus Christi’ is nominated for best International Feature at The Oscars and comes from Poland. It is a religious parable of sorts, which is interesting because it comes from a mostly Catholic country – nearly 90% of the people identify as Roman Catholic. It stars Bartosz Bielenia as Daniel, a young man who was just paroled from juvie. He wants to be a priest, but cannot be accepted to the seminary because of his record (I wonder if that is a Catholic rule) He is sent to a rural town to work in their sawmill but when he gets there, gets mistaken for the young priest they have been waiting for, so voila, he becomes ‘Father Thomas.’

This sounds like a set up for a mistaken-identity comedy, but the film is much more intelligent than that. Father Thomas connects with the town folk – he drinks and smokes with them, and before you know it, the pews are crowded as he says mass. We get lessons in false idolatry, and how charisma can sway people to believe what you want them to believe. Father Thomas seems sincere because he is, we identify with him because just like us, he is an unapologetic sinner. There are some sub plots that populate the film and they distract from a main idea. I never got fully invested in a story line about young kids dying from an accident, and the shady mayor just felt all too familiar. But Bielenia is a star – you simply cannot turn away from him when he is on screen. This is a thought provoking film, and while I am not a practicing Catholic, I still have all of it in my head, and there is a lot I can identify and repel in this film.

It’s Christmas Day, so what better to celebrate than write about a film about doomed love? ‘Cold War’ is Poland’s entry for Best Foreign Film this year, and because its closest rival, ‘Roma’ (from Mexico) is being elevated, this film has been garnering a lot of attention.

And of course I loved this film – a love story that is big, bold, not necessarily unrequited but nevertheless doomed. It’s a hot mess situation from the very beginning, and it only gets to be a bigger mess as it perseveres through decades. It’s unruly, undisciplined, but at the same time, that makes it more seeped in passion – this big ‘thing’ that never quite makes it, until it flames out in a way that it does, and then it doesn’t.

Written and directed by Pawel Pawiloski, the film is inspired by his parent’s love story, and he even names his characters after them – Zula Lichon (Joana Kulig, smoldering in the best possible way) and Wiktor Warski (Thomas Kot, slow burn simmering)  – lovers who first meet in post-war Poland. They start a clandestine love affair and for years and ears after, they just can’t quit each other. While I was watching it, there was a part of me that became exasperated with the two characters – how much is enough, really – but as I thought about it more, I realized that it was intentional as the story wanted us to experience how it felt being in the middle of that relationship. And there’s a great jazz vocal element in the film – Zula records one while she is living in Paris, and the songs and her performance of them are swoon-worthy. Shot in glorious black in white, the film feels like old-fashioned romance, and it feels it. Once upon a time, when I was a full-pledged hopeless romantic, I probably would have lapped this film whole. Now that I am older and bitter, I can still see the beauty in it, but with a lot of reservations.