Warsaw. The balding Ryszard, nicknamed "teddy bear", divorced his wife Irena: they now both want to take their joint life savings from a bank in London before the other one does, but Ryszard discovers Irena tore up pages from his passport, making it useless. Ryszard thus asks his friend, Jan, a film production manager, for help: they publish an add searching for Ryszard's double, to use his passport instead. They find him in Stanislaw, a brute coal worker, but he has huge hair, so Ryszard's girlfriend Aleksandra pours a low-quality shampoo on his head, causing him to become bald. After they gave Stanislaw sleeping pills and knocked him out, Ryszard takes his passport and travels to London, but meets Irena in the same airplane. Irena writes that Ryszard has heroin in his suitcase to a passenger's customs declaration, but since Ryszard travels under Stanislaw's name, the customs officers cannot discover him. Ryszard takes all the money from the joint account and transfers it to another bank, and then returns to Warsaw.
In this cult comedy starring comedian Stanislaw Tym, who also co-wrote the script, the humor is firmly entrenched in Polish mentality and satirical local cultural references (typical for Eastern Europe during Communist mismanagement), which made it ideal for the Polish audiences, but somewhat less so for the wider, universal audience. Nonetheless, "Teddy Bear" also has enough "universal" jokes which can be understood by people worldwide, though the Poles will understand it the most, feeling it is just on their "wavelength". Tym plays the balding, sleazy Ryszard who is rushing to get his life savings from a bank before his wife, but the plot is just an excuse to insert as many jokes as possible that spoof corruption, incompetence, clientelism, primitivism, scammers and chaos in his society where rule of law is absent. In one of the best jokes that reveal with what kind of characters we are dealing with, Ryszard explains to his friend Jan that he has a rich aunt in London who was deceived that he has a twin: "She's old, rich, and lives in London, get it? My parents sent her my picture, slightly altered. There were two of me in it, like twins. Aunt kept sending money for two kids. It wasn't a big deal for her, but it was to us."
While filming a movie, the crew is tasked with finding a rabbit for one scene on the field, but since they are too lazy, they just attach the fur of a stuffed rabbit on the back of a cat (!), so when the cameras start rolling and the dogs start chasing it, the costumed cat simply climbs up on a tree. At the airport, Ryszard has this exchange with a nervous flight attendant: "A bad hair day." - "Excuse me?" - "That's what we call a day when all planes leave on time. It's chaos." This is a sly jab at public transport where being late was so normalized that any random punctuality would actually cause a fuss. In a public canteen, the plates are fixed to the tables, and two spoons are attached with a short chain to prevent them from being stolen. The giant stuffed teddy bear which is being flown on a helicopter thus becomes a symbol for the origin of all this vice, Moscow's Communism imposed on Eastern Europe. "Teddy Bear" is clumsy and chaotic, with not that much sense for being cinematic, since Stanislaw Bareja directs the film in a conventional manner, and some misguided jokes seem as if they came from a Benny Hill sketch, but its underlying theme and hidden motives reveal that it did not become a cult film for nothing.
Grade:++
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