Patrycja and Lukrecja are two transvestites who grew up in a communist state. They spent the 70s and 80s on the margins, finding glamour in misery, strutting through parks and public restrooms, seducing Soviet soldiers, living off drunks, and watching their friends die of AIDS.
For anyone who wasn’t there, their shameless and mischievous stories from those years seem scandalous. Now they are about to go to Lubiewo, a coastal tourist town on the Baltic inhabited by a younger generation of emancipated gays, and they realize that being gay in today’s reactionary and self-righteous Poland is no longer as interesting as it was under the communists. Veterans and youth maintain a fierce struggle. The former claim their dissolute customs and hold a certain nostalgia for communist Poland. The latter, more civilized, demand equality, respect, the right to marriage and adoption... All share a taste for dispute and extravagance. Like in the Decameron, Lovetown mixes portraits, anecdotes, sexual scenes, and memories of debauchery, taking us to a hidden world. Heir to Pasolini, but also to Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, Witkowski performs a literary feat. Constantly shifting perspective, he moves from tragedy to comedy, from idyll to satire, from the sordid to the sublime, with a freedom that mocks all taboos.
