I prefer to see Floating Skyscrapers as a beautiful though heartbreaking film that cuts to the deepest truths about love and human nature. That it’s trend-setting, groundbreaking and a lot of other hackneyed things that don’t mean much.
It’s also an attempt to tell viewers that they shouldn’t label love or affection, that these kind of feelings can be found anywhere.Īll over the Internet, people have been writing that this movie touches the ‘no-go’ area. To me this movie is an attempt to talk objectively and with no unnecessary emotions about something that to this day divides Polish society. Maybe it’s because this story is a bit too visually beautiful, creating a sort of a fantasy world that doesn’t exist in reality. Maybe it’s because of homosexuality is still such a controversial topic in Poland. However, I feel that the director walks a tightrope between the scandal and the universality of the story. We see their lack of self- acceptance, superficial tolerance and dearth of self-understanding. Their motives seem real and their actions are very human. In this pair, Wasilewski created very deep, empathetic and believable characters. They struggle not only to be accepted by others, but also by themselves.
His relationship with Michał develops slowly through a series of back-and-forth actions and exchanges. He’s got short hair, trains in swimming and is, generally speaking, quite masculine.
This label is a bit unfair, since Wasilewski managed to avoid social stereotypes and the story is mostly free of common clichés. Because of this choice of characters, Floating Skyscrapers gets referred to as ‘the first LGBT Polish movie’. Their fight isn’t with their loved ones it’s with society as a whole. Wasilewski’s Romeo and Juliet are Kuba (Mateusz Banasiuk) and Michał, who aren’t star-crossed lovers from feuding families they’re two young men. The dialogue in Floating Skyscrapers starts with Michał (Bartosz Gelner) asking: ‘Is that a joint?’ This is, admittedly, not quite as poetic as Romeo’s ‘If I profane with my unworthiest hand…’ speech, but even so, there’s a universal appeal at work in this movie from its very beginning. It’s so versatile that it begs a comparison to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Its director, Tomasz Wasilewski, created a universal love story with a tragic twist. Even sexually.įloating Skyscrapers (2013), then, seems like a very appropriate title if we want to describe the innate tendency of humans to change over time. Anyways, the Kinsey scale shows us a simple truth about the human nature – we are not made of stone, and having said that, we can float. I’m not sure if the scale measures my sexual potential or the level of my inhibitions.
According to the test results, I’m ‘predominantly heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual’. And I’m a ‘2’, which is a bit surprising since I have always considered myself purely heterosexual. You can take the test here: /kinseyscaletest. According the Kinsey, people’s positions on the scale tend to shift over time. ‘0’ on the Kinsey scale means ‘exclusively heterosexual’, while ‘6’ means ‘exclusively homosexual’. They introduced the Kinsey scale (0-6) that attempts to describe a person’s sexual orientation. In 1948, Alfred Kinsey and his co-workers published the first study of sexual behavior in humans.