Jajo (1984)

This extremely odd 45 minute film was made for Polish television and was first broadcast on 29 November 1984. It’s a peculiar piece, one that’s hard, if not impossible, to classify – it’s essentially a revenge drama but it also features, if only briefly, a bird/lizard monster that rapes and impregnates one of the female characters before disappearing from the plot completely.

Directed by Konrad Szolajski, Jajo (Polish for egg) starts with Ewa (Marta Klubowicz) arriving to begin work as assistant to the mysterious Professor Augustyniak (Janusz Michalowski) and his wife (Ewa Zukowska) who are engaged in experiments in “spontaneous parthenogenesis in mice.” She’s brought with her a mysterious egg that she wants to incubate in the professor’s “accelerator.” Ewa makes strange claims about having been a cuckoo in a previous life and the oddball characters around her, including Augustyniak’s assistant Jacek (Andrzej Szopa), take an unusual interest in her health. Against Augustyniak’s wishes Ewa puts the egg in the accelerator and a week later it hatches a winged monster, apparently from the Andes, that attacks the professor’s never-named wife before flying away. The woman is soon heavily pregnant and at the climax gives birth – to another egg.

Often impenetrable and full of inexplicable narrative detours, Jajo is a fascinating if largely incomprehensible vignette that seems to be quite profound though you may struggle to work out why. Characters add in odd, unmotivated way and seem obsessed with details and minutiae that have little, if any, impact on the actual plot. The monster is barely seen and isn’t all that impressive anyway, and we never find out what it’s meant to be nor what its relationship with Ewa is. We’re simply told that that  after attacking Mrs Augustyniak it “flew away.” The plot (scripted by Szolajski) eventually turns out to have something to do with Jacek taking revenge on Augustyniak for stealing his work though again quite what he has to do with the monster is obscure as is much else in the film. He’d been in the Andes at one point we’re told and there are hints that Ewa may be his daughter though they don’t seem to recognise each other. Augustyniak’s work is frustratingly ill explained. There’s talk of “analytic reconstruction” of bones, he takes an interest in eggs but also experiments on mice, including a distressing scene of a real mouse being tormented and killed as part of some test or other.

The score, by Jerzy Matula, is, for the most part rather good, suitably eerie until the very end when the new egg is laid and suddenly we’re assailed by a jolly carnival music style cue that leaves you unsure whether what you’re watching is meant to be a comedy or not. Irena Chorynska’s editing is sometimes disorientating, possibly deliberately so though again that’s not clear, the film suddenly jumping forward in time with no explanation – after the monster attacks Mrs Augustyniak, Ewa is knocked unconscious and when she comes too, the woman is very heavily pregnant and no-one seems at all surprised. Has Ewa been out for nine months (if so, how come no-one seems all that concerned that she’s suddenly woken up?) or has Mrs Augustyniak’s pregnancy been unusually swift? Like so much in Jajo, it all goes unexplained. It’s a wilfully obscure but still strangely compelling film that will leave you scratching your head trying to fathom what you’ve just seen.