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"Poland has blown up in our faces!" End of the war, May 8th, 1945, dark night of the national soul. One last assassination still for Home Army partisans, the "skillful removal" of the Communist minister (Wacław Zastrzeżyński). The failed ambush is picked up at the Hotel Monopol, where the underground lieutenant (Zbigniew Cybulski) vacillates between orders and romance with the barmaid (Ewa Krzyżewska). "Everything at its proper time." Beginnings and terminations amid the ruins, a snarl of destinies in baroque deep-focus. Andrzej Wajda opens on a pastoral note and torches it promptly, waiting on roadside grass for a jeep to be machine-gunned down, bullet holes on a victim's coat burst into flames as he stumbles into a nearby chapel. (The image is later reflected at the bar, with glasses of alcohol lit on fire in impromptu eulogy for fallen comrades.) Russian troops and stray white horses roam the streets, in bed the doleful blonde wonders about the sensitive killer's tinted specs—a result of time spent in the kanal during the Uprising, "a souvenir of unrequited love for my homeland." Out of the rain and into the crypt for the young couple, Norwid quotes adorn bombed-out walls like hieroglyphs as a vast crucified Christ looms upside-down in the foreground. The assignment is carried out, fireworks for one corpse and splattered sheets for another, cf. Borges' "The Night of the Gifts." Anguished at the crossroads, the conscience of a country envisioned as a lost saint-poet-executioner and embodied by its most charismatic doomed star. A fire-extinguisher for the banquet, "the last dance, in A major." Marx's ash heap of history is brought to bear upon the protagonist, Wajda having already stated the theme: "The end of the war isn't the end of our fight." With Adam Pawlikowski, Bogumił Kobiela, Stanisław Milski, Jan Ciecierski, Artur Mlodnicki, Halina Kwiatkowska, and Ignacy Machowski. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |