Bread and Salt review – clarity and rigour as a talented Polish pianist returns to his hometown | Film

There’s an icy, unforgiving clarity and compositional rigour to this arresting feature debut from Polish film-maker Damian Kocur, made using non-professionals and partly inspired by a violent incident from real life; it won the special jury prize at Venice in 2022.

Real-life Polish pianist Tymoteusz Bies plays Tymek, a high-achieving young man studying piano at Warsaw’s Chopin University of Music. He’s returned for the summer break to his drab home town, perhaps based on Ełk in the north-east, where all the kids he grew up with are heading for useless jobs and humdrum lives. He’s happy to be back with his music teacher mum and his brother Jacek (played by his actual brother Jacek Bies) but is perplexed and irritated by the fact that Jacek, despite his own piano talent, isn’t really working hard to get a musical scholarship, like him.

Jacek seems lazily content to live his life with a local girlfriend in this grim dead-end town, with all its racism, Islamophobia and homophobia, which is directed at a nearby Tunisian kebab shop; its hardworking owners tell Tymek that the traditional Polish welcome of “bread and salt” has not been forthcoming. And Tymek is also coldly resistant to answering Jacek’s questions as to whether he has a girlfriend in Warsaw. But something strange happens; we see how Tymek is rather gratified by his celebrity status here with his old pals; he’s quite content to hang out with them all summer long, playing basketball, listening to them freestyle rapping, and he even laughs along to the racist jokes over the endless beers. He certainly wants to get closer to his brother, but it ends in catastrophe.

There’s one quite extraordinary scene here which has stayed with me, more violent than anything in the finale. Tymek’s mother asks him if he wouldn’t mind looking after a small pupil of hers for half an hour or so, a kid of maybe seven or eight, whose mother is running late to pick him up after class. The reason is that this kid is a talented piano-player, just as Tymek used to be at this age, and maybe this child can play for Tymek on the family’s battered old untuned upright. Clearly Tymek is expected to be kindly and encouraging to this helpless little kid, but the poor infant’s playing is instead met with cold and heavy-handed instruction by Tymek. Somehow, Tymek can’t resist the punitive mode of classical music teaching where the emphasis is on submission and humiliation. And he does exactly the same thing while listening to his brother’s playing: fierce and obtuse criticism, a stick without a carrot. Who can blame Jacek for not wanting Tymek’s vocation?

Bread and Salt takes its place in a distinct movie tradition of showing the classical piano technique as expressive of repressed emotional pain and even violence, something to be escaped from: previous examples include Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, James Toback’s Fingers (remade by Jacques Audiard as The Beat That My Heart Skipped) and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. There is a disconnect, both in terms of culture and class, between the talented working-class classical piano student and all the people of his background, an aspirational mode which wrenches you away from your past and may offer only the most emotionally refrigerated way of life. This is an intriguing debut from Kocur.

There’s an icy, unforgiving clarity and compositional rigour to this arresting feature debut from Polish film-maker Damian Kocur, made using non-professionals and partly inspired by a violent incident from real life; it won the special jury prize at Venice in 2022.

Real-life Polish pianist Tymoteusz Bies plays Tymek, a high-achieving young man studying piano at Warsaw’s Chopin University of Music. He’s returned for the summer break to his drab home town, perhaps based on Ełk in the north-east, where all the kids he grew up with are heading for useless jobs and humdrum lives. He’s happy to be back with his music teacher mum and his brother Jacek (played by his actual brother Jacek Bies) but is perplexed and irritated by the fact that Jacek, despite his own piano talent, isn’t really working hard to get a musical scholarship, like him.

Jacek seems lazily content to live his life with a local girlfriend in this grim dead-end town, with all its racism, Islamophobia and homophobia, which is directed at a nearby Tunisian kebab shop; its hardworking owners tell Tymek that the traditional Polish welcome of “bread and salt” has not been forthcoming. And Tymek is also coldly resistant to answering Jacek’s questions as to whether he has a girlfriend in Warsaw. But something strange happens; we see how Tymek is rather gratified by his celebrity status here with his old pals; he’s quite content to hang out with them all summer long, playing basketball, listening to them freestyle rapping, and he even laughs along to the racist jokes over the endless beers. He certainly wants to get closer to his brother, but it ends in catastrophe.

There’s one quite extraordinary scene here which has stayed with me, more violent than anything in the finale. Tymek’s mother asks him if he wouldn’t mind looking after a small pupil of hers for half an hour or so, a kid of maybe seven or eight, whose mother is running late to pick him up after class. The reason is that this kid is a talented piano-player, just as Tymek used to be at this age, and maybe this child can play for Tymek on the family’s battered old untuned upright. Clearly Tymek is expected to be kindly and encouraging to this helpless little kid, but the poor infant’s playing is instead met with cold and heavy-handed instruction by Tymek. Somehow, Tymek can’t resist the punitive mode of classical music teaching where the emphasis is on submission and humiliation. And he does exactly the same thing while listening to his brother’s playing: fierce and obtuse criticism, a stick without a carrot. Who can blame Jacek for not wanting Tymek’s vocation?

Bread and Salt takes its place in a distinct movie tradition of showing the classical piano technique as expressive of repressed emotional pain and even violence, something to be escaped from: previous examples include Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, James Toback’s Fingers (remade by Jacques Audiard as The Beat That My Heart Skipped) and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher. There is a disconnect, both in terms of culture and class, between the talented working-class classical piano student and all the people of his background, an aspirational mode which wrenches you away from your past and may offer only the most emotionally refrigerated way of life. This is an intriguing debut from Kocur.