The film begins with Polish Jew Filip (Eryk Kulm) beginning his performance in a Warsaw Ghetto cabaret with his fiancé Sara. The audience and performers all wear armbands with a Star of David. Germans enter the cabaret massacring the audience including Sara. Filip escapes and through a Polish manager/black marketeer, Staszeki, of a compulsory labour dormitory in Frankfurt taking a position as a waiter at the upscale Park Hotel.
Filip has a penchant, perhaps even a dangerous obsession, for German women. Filip is subject to many restrictions placed on compulsory workers in Germany. German law forbade fraternization, upon penalty of death, between German women and compulsory workers who are from “conquered territories”. Filip’s assumed name is Frenchman Phillipe Junot. All the waiters but one at the Grand Hotel are compulsory workers. Filip shares a room with fellow waiter Pierre.
There are several encounters between Filip and Germans where he is insulted as a filthy foreigner.
The danger is magnified by the fact Filip is a Jew an identity concealed through false identification papers. Filip’s goal is to humiliate, debase and defile the German women he seduces and ultimately make hem feel like whores.
At a park swimming pool Filip eyes Lisa (Caroline Hartig) a daughter in a prominent Nazi family. Pierre bets Filip he can’t seduce Lisa. Filip pursues Lisa and captures her heart. Does he reciprocate the love or is it his brand of justified misogyny that is hate not love?
Filip is questioned by the Gestapo for an earlier dalliance with a German women Blanka Brandt but is released through the work of his quick tongue.
A fellow waiter Francesco is beaten and dragged away in front of the wait staff for fornication with a general’s wife. He is hung publicly with other compulsory labourers who have had sexual encounters with German women. His friend Pierre is executed at the hotel by a German officer for stealing a bottle of wine from the restaurant. At this point Filip at the edge of madness confesses to the executioner of Pierre he is Jew and insults the German nation. The officer does not believe this story under the impression Filip is distraught and hysterical over the death of his friend Pierre.
The film culminates with Filip and Lisa preparing to flee by train to Paris but Filip has one more wait assignment at the Park Hotel which is a marriage of a high-ranking military leader’s cousin.
As the guests are happily dancing to the music of “The Frankfurt Express” misogyny is elevated to the “action” Filip craves. In one last brazen act of misogyny Filip boards the Paris bound train as new recruits in the passage to platforms march off to the front.
Superb costuming and sets in “Filip” lend great authenticity to the production.
You can watch the trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQc9fJAs7-w&t=2s
The film is directed by Michal Kwieciński.
Based on a 1961 autobiographical novel by Leopold Tyrmand.
It will be screening at the Biannual Kino Polska Film Festival in New York on 15September2025.
RKS 2025 Film Rating: 92/100.
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