For three years, I worked at an op shop. I would handle donations, serve customers, price items and hang clothes. I saw many people pass through my store in those years, and many objects pass through my hands. Unlike an op shop, which is largely a charity store where things donated are given to us for free and sold at a cheap price, a pawn shop buys items from people and resells them for others. Despite this, the customer base is the same. The regulars: the poor and the destitute.
The Pawnshop is a self proclaimed ‘black docu-comedy’, the debut feature by Polish director Łukasz Kowalski. The film follows the employees of a pawnshop that is on its last legs. Shot in an objective, passive style, the director abstains from providing his views on these people, following along simultaneously in close proximity yet at arms length, allowing us to form our own opinions on the events that transpire.
Last year I completed my Honors in Film Studies. Coincidentally, it was around this time that I decided to leave my job at the op shop. My thesis discussed Polish science fiction cinema of the 1980s. Despite being as far off as you can get from pawn shops in the 2020s, the political turmoil of this period still reverberates to this day.
Poland is a country that has gone through various occupations throughout its tumultuous history, especially in the last Century. Constantly adrift and searching for an identity of its own, the country has been under the thumb of varying outside political ideologies, causing mass oppression and economic disparity. First it was Nazi Germany, then Communist Soviet Russia and, since the 1990s, Western Neo-Liberal Capitalism.
Since the instatement of Capitalism, Poland has undergone a number of issues: mass poverty, a rise of far right ideologies in government, stripping of female autonomous rights, among others. The humble pawn shop becomes a synecdoche for the issues at large with Western Capitalism. Swaths of objects, once mass produced, sitting untouched on shelves, each with personal histories now discarded. If it’s not bought it will get thrown away for good. People desperate for clothes, food, money, a place to sleep, come and barter or search in vain for something – anything! – cheap.
Scenes that stick out in my mind from the film include pervasive shots of the claustrophobic shop floors. Mounds and piles of donated goods engulf and fill the frame, with the knowledge that they were once owned by someone, that they once served a purpose.
When I worked in the op shop, I served many people just looking for something to keep them warm. I would give discounts to them just to make their lives easier. At the same time, there was a lot of pressure from the higher ups to drive up prices, to force people to pay for things they can’t afford and may not even need. I would often serve people who bought things just to sell at a higher price elsewhere. I would serve rich people who complained about the price of a vintage salt shaker I knew they’d never use. I’d serve hoarders and carry tables to their already filled cars, bursting at the seams.
The Pawnshop’s comedy derives largely from the reliability of its situations, its characters. You’ve seen or served these people before. But it also comes from the callousness of the owners and employees, swindling people out of money for items you know they can’t afford. One scene sticks out in my mind, in which the owner refuses a refund to a customer regarding a blender sold to them that doesn’t work. The owner makes all sorts of excuses (“How do I know its my blender?”, “Our blender was working when we sold it, you must have done something to break it!”). I can recall my bosses telling me these exact things to say to customers who also demanded refunds for things sold under false pretences.
If The Pawnshop is anything, it is less a meditation on Poland’s political history, but rather our shared oppression under Capitalism, with the pawn shop the perfect analogy for our need to provide kindness towards others. It is not the shop owner’s fault that they underpay their staff, rob the poor and treat people like crap. While rude and certainly deserving of some kind of punishment, we must remember that Capitalism breeds this callousness, turning something meant for charity into an avenue for greed, avarice and moral putrefaction.
Harry Gay
Melbourne International Film Festival