Nothing new. “Broken”, designed to show the hardships that fell to the lot of a defenseless child soul, deprived of parental care, and the horrors of the penitentiary system, ruthlessly grinding down juvenile offenders, did not turn out to be at all intelligible for several reasons.
First, despite the fact that the relevance of the topic raised remains “timeless”, the film was late with the release of screens for at least a decade. Shot in a certain genre key, it almost one in one copies the same acutely social tapes of the end of perestroika and the collapse of the USSR, when the directors rushed en masse to display the entire ugly underside of life. Poland went through a similar period of the “velvet revolution”, so “Broken” would still be quite appropriate at the time, but not in 2003, when public attention shifted to completely different things. There is a clear secondary to it. You could close your eyes to this drawback if the authors tried to reveal the topic from some other side and showed an unusual and innovative view of the solution to the problem, but no, nothing fundamentally new from the film will not be possible to learn, just another sad story of the crippled fate of the child without any positive outcome.
In world cinema, there are much more talented works that really deserve close attention, works that rise in the heat of passion to the “Shakespeare heights”, incredibly tragic in essence, but still have a pronounced catharsis at the end. In such tapes, among other advantages, there is a powerful visual picture, unlike "Broken", the dullness and hopeless grayness of which do not cause any emotions. From this there are other drawbacks of the film - the lack of originality and art. It is impossible not to mention the weak, helpless realization – this is the absence of a clear plot, logically completed transitions between episodes, a completely “clumsy” game of actors, more like “kolkhoz” amateur activity. Also bewildering and created images of most characters, as if the creators rushed from one extreme to the other, from clown buffoonery to grotesque arthouse, from surreal allusions to black unsightly household.
And the main character turned out to be very smeared and spinless, and from the very beginning, apparently being “broken” from birth. It is not possible to sympathize with him, despite all the severe trials that fell to his lot. His behavior does not lend itself to explanation, unless we take into account obvious mental problems, in any case, the decision to exchange a quite prosperous (with all reservations) option with a boarding school for a special institution of a closed type looks very, very strange. The film leaves a great bewilderment and a sense of squeamishness, so who is interested in the issues raised in it, I advise you to turn to more picturesque and integral works, like the classic "Four beats" or modern "Song for an outcast".