Wonderful character development!

Best movie of this year hands down!

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Judging from the lack of reviews this movie isn't very well known, but it is quite funny. The main character is a con man who seems pathologically driven to take on new identities at the drop of a hat. He then runs scams using the new identity. The movie has a light touch, and though the humor might be a bit dry for some, I found it to be very funny throughout. It seems that some of the scams he runs are facilitated by the vagaries of the communist system that Poland was under at the time, and since the movie came out in 1989 I'm sure it was an intentional critique of a crumbling hierarchy. The funniest sequence is the last one, in which our hero of many names becomes a high-level dignitary until his luck inevitably runs out. Beautifully done.