Rating: 4.5/5
Criterion Challenge 2022 | 25/52 | Made in Poland
May 8, 1945 The birds sing outside a small country church. Maciek lay resting g next to Andrzej. They discuss the details again — Szczuka, Secretary of the District Workers’ Party. A small girl asks Andrzej to open the church for her. He shows her that it’s locked and tells her to scram.
Drewnowski, on the lookout, gives a whistle to signal the target arriving. Maciek and Andrzej grab their automatic weapons and get in position. The car crests the horizon, and they shoot, causing it to crash. One slips out and runs for the church. Maciek riddles him with hot bullets that catch fire on the man’s coat.
Drewnowski takes their guns and runs. Maciek and Andrzej saunter off. Another vehicle comes soon after to find the bodies. It’s Szczuka, and the dead men were factory workers. Szczuka reminds the onlookers that more of this is to come — the war’s end is not the end of their fight for Poland.
In the city, an announcement informs everyone that Germany has signed an unconditional act of surrender. Drewnowski, who works for the mayor, goes to the Hotel Monopol Restaurant, where a banquet will be held for the war victory. He goes over the details to ensure the mayor will be pleased. Maciek sees a cute girl working the bar at the restaurant and orders a drink. Andrzej slips away to call their superior to inform him they completed the job. But Maciek, waiting in the lobby, overhears Szczuka and his aide enter.
The film follows Maciek as his team plots how to take out Szczuka. Meanwhile, through his many encounters that night, he wonders if he’s doing the right thing — for the country, but more importantly, for himself.
So often, you are a burning torch with flakes of burning hemp falling about you. Flaming, you know not whether flames bring freedom or death, consuming all you cherish. Will only ashes remain and chaos whirling in the void? Or will the ashes hold the glory of a starlike diamond, the Morning Star of everlasting triumph?
Throughout the movie, propaganda inundates the characters. After the victory announcement, they show films of Polish armies stopping tanks and taking prisoners. At the banquet, the musical performance is a woman singing about finding and killing the rat enemy. The war is over, but they must rebuild. And they must decide under whose idealism.
The film tones down the propagandistic tone of the novel on which it’s based, adding more shades of nuance to the resistance members compared to the novel’s caricature of bandits. This ambiguity stirred the ire of several Polish audiences. But this film would not be nearly as successful without the sympathetic treatment it gives all the characters.
This treatment falls in with director Andrzej Wajda’s philosophy and that of the Polish Film School, which followed Italian Neorealism but opposed Socialist Realism’s push for portraying the collective and focusing on the individuals at play.
Fire is a recurring motif — the fire on the coat from the bullets, the shots lit aflame in memory of fallen comrades, and the cigarettes that Maciek lights for Szczuka. Fire is all that remains of those consumed by the war. Passion and zeal carry victories and shorten lives. It works out, or it doesn’t.
Zbigniew Cybulski’s Maciek is a bit of an anachronism, reading more James Dean than WWII resistance operant. But that image of rebellion is what made him so iconic. And it fits the narrative as Maciek questions the idealism of the war he fights. The rhetoric he has consumed has led him to believe in heroism in his acts. Wajda interrogates the idea of the hero contrasted with the person allowed to exist in the world.
— I can't go on killing and hiding. I just want to live. You've got to understand! — You keep forgetting you're one of us. And that counts.
The film has heavy themes but presents them with a breezy effortlessness. It has so many iconic moments and scenes. I’ve never seen a wartime film handle its subjects this way. It’s disorienting but in a good way.
If I were Maciek, I would simply defect for Ewa Krzyżewska.