Creators' baby steps lean towards autobiography and imitation. Take, for example, Touch Me/Dotknij mnie, a début full-feature for thirty-year-old recent graduates of the Lódz Film School, writer-producer-directors Anna Jadowska and Ewa Stankiewicz. A prize-winner at its country's National Feature Film Festival last year and one of six films pre-screened of twenty-three to be shown during the April-May "Forever Changes: Polish Cinema Since 1989" at Lincoln Center, it cannot make up its mind and winds up an uncontrolled hodgepodge.

Touch Me aspires to be satire, straight comedy, drama, tragedy, a sad or a love story, surrealistic, and social commentary, straining together Altmanesque mosaic (through proximity of thin-doored living quarters), Wellesian tilted "Dutch" camera (Betacam SP) angles; graininess and under-/overexposure, blue, red or yellow washes, back lighting, dream vision, long patterned hallways, sweeping monumental architecture and peeling tenement walls, all to minimalist silly dialogue.

Since its birth more than a hundred years ago, Polish cinema has been hamstrung by insufficient funding and government interference. Decimated in the Second World War, the industry then struggled to some prominence only to founder after the 1968 student uprising, purges, unrest and anti-Semitism. Resistance to restrictions culminated in veteran Andrzej Wajda's truth-in-film/journalism celebratory Man of Marble, Without Anesthesia aka Rough Treatment, and Man of Iron, which in turn led to government closing of all movie theaters in 1981 and a public boycott on their reopening under more rigorous censorship. Since the collapse of the Communist PUWP, however, in spite of continued economic distress there has been a steady increase in production quantity but, as should be expected, wild fluctuations in terms of quality.

In line with the national cinema's traditional focus on socioeconomic and historical concerns, this ninety-minute film takes root in the recession and unemployment that affect its characters, whose dreams of meaningful work and relationships are set against dark dreary interiors, dusty disrepaired streets, garbage containers, seedy clubs, graffiti and flickering television screens.

"Mainly, I just walk to the unemployment office," admits Silvio/Sylwek (Sylwester Jakimow). There are no jobs for him and fellow squatter Peter/Piotr (Piotr Miazga), Theatre Academy students fired from a homemakers' TV station gig and lacking the university degrees required to pick and cut fruit abroad or sweep McDonald's floors. Their water cut off, they wash up inside the cheap portable saunas pushed by underemployed friend Wojtek (Wojciech Zielinski) and consider soft-core acting.

Shy Carol/Karolina (Karolina Obrebska) asks for the actor's autograph and, hoping for a date, knocks at his flat, but is treated dismally. She is the friend of Annie/Ania (Anna Bielecka), another dazed adolescent, whom Silvio momentarily helps out for no reason -- "Don't touch me, I don't like it when people touch me" -- before visiting a B-girl bar where he is first nice, then nasty, to a pathetic prostitute (Iza Nowakowska).

While Silvio fantasizes about some dream girl (Norah McGettigan), Annie's sad-eyed mother Eve/Ewa (Ewa Szykulska) attracts the instant love of cop Gregory December (Grzegorz Slosz), twenty years her junior, when he shows up to investigate a screaming bout between her partner (Cezary Majdajski) and the daughter. Soon the policeman helps her sew, serenades and pleads from the street below, and officiously butts into Annie's boring teenage life. Quietly moved by the younger man's infatuation, out of the blue and without rhyme or reason, in broad daylight Eve sexually attacks Peter in her stalled car.

In this mishmash these lonely people are impelled to actions contrary to love, unlovely in unflattering close-ups and in their unreasoned little cruelties. With jarring noises and artsy camerawork, the film keeps them and itself at insuperable distance. Everything defeats everything else. Even Annie, whose final handholding boyfriend presumably stands for something of hope, has her several exasperating moments of yes-no, tak-nie.

(Released by Bendom Films; not rated by MPAA.)