Quo Vadis, Poland

I am a bit late with my entry for this Sunday Stamps' edition, but I was away for the day yesterday and just didn't manage to squeeze this post in, so here comes this post on a cold, gloomy, rainy Monday morning.

I was actually very intrigued to see what people would come up to when it comes to this not so popular letter Q - and I've seen quite some interesting posts.
The first idea that crossed my mind was of course, Qatar, but I only seem to have like one FDC from there, and a rather plain one, so in the end I decided to go with these 3 Polish ones (yeah, Poland again...) regarding the Polish version of the "Quo Vadis" movie.

Issued in 2001, the same year the movie was released (and actually  Poczta Polska was the sponsor of the movie, therefore the stamps I guess).
The movie was directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz, based on the book of the same title by Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (1895), which in turn has been made into motion pictures several times. The central plot in the movie revolves around the love of a Roman patrician, Marcus Vinicius, towards a Christian girl (coming from the territory of modern-day Poland) set against the backdrop of the persecutions against Christians during the reign of Nero.
It was Poland's submission to the 74th Academy Awards for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but was not nominated.
For the purposes of this post, I decided to watch the movie as well, even though I am not much of a fan of historical movies, plus definitely not ones that last for 170 minutes, and I can now guess why it was not nominated in the end - at times the movie feels like a joke. Good idea - poor execution. Esp the character of Petronius, portrayed by Boguslaw Linda - you can see him on the left stamp below, the guy in the background.
He simply seemed so detached from his character, so out of place in the entire story and all the scenes (I have only seen him in another movie before, the 7th part of the Dekalog series, where he kinda had the exact same attitude in the acting, but I guess in that setting, it suited him more...).
Then there is this scene where Marcus is running through fire - I couldn't tell if they were actually shooting a commercial here about some kind of men's cologne water, or he was trying to save Rome from the fire.
And since I see that scene on the right stamp below - the one where Lygia is lying asleep on a running bull - how on earth did her looong hair manage to sit so still, covering her breasts, during all that running and fighting - as if it was glued or something - seriously, some ridiculous moments in there.

The choice of female characters was right on spot indeed - regarding their appearance at least - they did have this divine and fragile beauty of goddesses (whether good or evil), that I guess was the idea behind it all.

So all in all, I really don't know if this movie deserved to find its place on stamps, even though if was sponsored by Poczta Polska - Polish cinematography is waaaay better than this, and one of my all time favourite directors is part of it actually - Krzysztof Kieslowski - not an ordinary kind of director and screenwriter, not one who was into blockbusters, but his movies have some different kind of depth and story-telling, esp his Dekalog series, and has indeed received a lot of awards for his work, not only for Dekalog but also the "Three Colours" trilogy, as well as The Double life of Veronique - you may give them a try :) (Poland should issue stamps commemorating him and his notable works instead, cos from what I know so far, no such stamps have been issued).

For more stuff on the letter Q - click this link

...and have a nice week ahead! :)

ps. maybe the other Quo Vadis movies are better executed (one of them is actually a silent film from 1912), but frankly, I dont feel like spending hours and hours of watching the same story all over again...