It is the future year of 1991 and the world's press have assembled to see the latest pioneering experiment into preservation. Professor Kuppelweiser (Janusz Michalowski) has already frozen, and successfully revived after six months, a chimpanzee, but now he's ambitiously going to do the same with humans, specifically Max (Jerzy Stuhr) and Albert (Olgeird Lukaszewicz), who will be frozen for three years. The two men are enthusiastic, even if Max's wife, watching on television, is extremely angry about being left behind with a young daughter to raise on her own. And so Max and Albert are placed in their pod and the process begins... but things will be very different when they wake up.
Written by the director Juliusz Machulski with Jolanta Hartwig and Pavel Hajny, Sexmission, or Sexmisja as it was known as in its native Polish, was an East European sex comedy strongly reminisent of Woody Allen's similar film Sleeper. However, while Allen sent up the society of the seventies, Sexmission tackles the battle of the sexes as the world Max and Albert are revived in is entirely populated by women. It's a lot like those nineteen-fifties sci-fi movies where the astronauts would land amongst a race of females, like Cat-Women of the Moon or Queen of Outer Space, except here it's not so much camp as played for laughs.
As you may have guessed, and as it takes a while for its protagonists to realise, they have not awoken in the year 1994, but the year 2044, fifty-three years later. At first Max is wondering where his salary is, but gets used to the idea of an all-woman future, at least until the consequences hit him. The two men are held prisoner in their cell, not allowed to smoke and given bland, tasteless food to eat, and subject to the whims of their captors' scientific studies. Women now reproduce through parthenogenesis so men are not necessary, and at any rate have been wiped out by a genetic weapon during the Third World War.
The scientist in charge of Max and Albert is Lamia (Bozena Stryjkówna), but as we see with her dealings with the other scientists this future is no utopia but a divided society split into two factions. The men attempt to escape their prison, but fail, while Lamia grows intrigued by them, especially Max after he kisses her, and goes to visit the oldest woman around in her cell-like home to find out more about men. The tone is something akin to an extended Benny Hill sketch, except here the women really take their clothes off, meaning the filmmakers' intentions are put into question: is this a satire on a totalitarian regime, or the Polish version of Confessions of a Window Cleaner?
It's interesting that a country which was under a strict regime itself should produce a criticism of such a state, but mainly this is about the sexes getting along with each other and falling in love. I don't know how long it took for women's liberation to reach Poland, but on this evidence it wasn't taken very seriously. Sexmission is pretty funny for all that, and brightly acted by Stuhr and Lukaszewicz, featuring some fun details such as the radiation mutated animals (a tortoise-rabbit, anyone?) and the group of jazz performing lesbians Max and Albert stumble across during their second escape. There are also neat twists that reveal all is not what it seems and complicate the message, and the male sexual fantasy set up is lampooned with vigour even if it's not clear whose side they're on. Probably both. Music by Henryk Kuzniak.
