I came across this article in the N.Y. Times today that had a reference to Sergio. A Polish film that's being touted as the first Polish Western and Spaghetti. The film was shown at the 2006 Venice Film Festival. Although it's been out sometime it appears it's just getting a release in the States now. I didn't see an existing thread for it. Just a mention on the 2007 Venice Film Festival thread. Val Kilmer is in the cast. The episodic, vignette description doesn't sound good.
Here's article:
New York Times
Movie Review
Summer Love (2006)
Tumbleweeds, Sagebrush and Kielbasa on the RangeBy MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: October 17, 2007
A conceptual nudge in the ribs, “Summer Love” has been called the first Polish western and the first Polish spaghetti western, though the truer description might be the first deconstructed art western. (The film is being shown through Nov. 9 at the Whitney Museum of American Art.)
In a cheeky act of appropriation or perhaps misappropriation, the artist Piotr Uklanski has relocated the classic American film from its familiar physical coordinates — the open range, a Hollywood back lot — to an anonymous, near-abstract space where the genre codes roam as free as the buffalo and the heroes and the villains play.
If it sounds like a bad joke — think “Once Upon a Time in Poland,” “The Good, the Bad and the Polish” or even “A Fistful of Poles” — it isn’t, quite. (It’s actually a fairly decent one.) Mr. Uklanski is a serious artist, or at least a semiserious artist, whose works have been exhibited around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art. Among his most well-known is “The Nazis,” an installation (and later a book) of photographs of actors like Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando, Yul Brynner and David Niven glammed up in National Socialist costume, a project that owes a strong debt to Susan Sontag’s important 1974 essay “Fascinating Fascism,” if without the corresponding intellectual rigor and moral unease.
Shot in southern Poland, “Summer Love” — the title matches the syrupy song oozing on the soundtrack — features a sorry collection of nameless archetypes amassed around a ramshackle town under a brilliant blue, blazingly bright sky. Among the players are the Stranger (Karel Roden), a gunslinger who wears black and bleeds red; the Woman (Katarzyna Figura), a busty barmaid whose monstrous tongue would make Gene Simmons blush; the Sheriff (Boguslaw Linda), a broken-down alcoholic carrying a sputtering torch for the barmaid; and the Big Man (Krzysztof Zaleski), a not-so-big man in filthy garb who lusts after the woman. Rather mysteriously, Val Kilmer pops up as the Wanted Man, a designation that may have more to do with celebrity than function.
Nothing much happens, which is to the filmmaker’s purpose. “Summer Love” isn’t a standard western but a series of loosely ordered, vaguely chronological narrative shards and iconographic images that will be familiar to anyone who has a casual acquaintance with the genre. Thus instead of a story and plot there are fired guns, dusty boots, grizzled beards, clanking spurs and galloping, whinnying, falling horses. Blood and booze and spit flow, along with the scripted clichés spoken in Polish-accented English. One man builds a scaffold and fashions a noose, another man loses his head and the barmaid loses her knickers. If this sounds like a Sergio Leone film, it is, kind of, sort of, if not as beautiful, pleasurable or profound.
There’s a flicker of a political critique embedded in Mr. Uklanski’s playful intervention and mocking tone, something about the displacement of the American cowboy ideology, though the film finally weighs in as more cynical and detached than passionate and engaged. In “Summer Love” the western is little more than a collection of disintegrated parts, frayed bits and shabby pieces of some formerly coherent idea, a vague suggestion of an ideal (democratic, cinematic) that has become as blurred as a copy of a copy of a copy. Mr. Uklanski keeps the joke going even over the final credits, with Lorne Greene, the paterfamilias from the television western series “Bonanza,” growling the 1960s song “I’m a Gun.” There’s something ominous about this kitsch ballad, which is precisely the point.
SUMMER LOVE
Opens today in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Piotr Uklanski; director of photography, Jacek Petrycki; edited by Mike Horton; produced by Mr. Uklanski, Staffan Ahrenberg and Hamish Skeggs. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue. Screenings, through Dec. 9, on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays at 11:30 a.m. and 2:45 p.m.; Fridays at 1:30, 3:45 and 6:30 p.m. Running time: 93 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Boguslaw Linda (the Sheriff), Karel Roden (the Stranger), Katarzyna Figura (the Woman), Krzysztof Zaleski (the Big Man) and Val Kilmer (the Wanted Man).
Here's link. Not sure how long it can be looked at before you have to register.
http://movies.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/movies/17love.html?em&ex=1192852800&en=8a4e71d549150f62&ei=5087&ref=artsHere's what imdb had:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486020/
