|
Andrzej Wajda starts with a bit of bravura, the credits run over a sprawling, spiraling track around the Warsaw slums, passing by children, shepherds and other fastidiously posed dumpster-dwellers before settling on a trio of lads playing with knives. One of them lies dead atop a Nazi supply train moments later, such are the lives of "patriotic thieves." The theme is the scrappy progression "from journeyman to hero" in the 1942 Poland of curfew sirens and corpse-adorned fences, film noir is the stylistic bedrock. The callow protagonist is a carpenter's apprentice (Tadeusz Lomnicki) who joins the underground resistance, galvanized by Janusz Paluszkiewicz's avuncular foreman ("There was once a wise bearded man named Karl Marx...") and Urszula Modrzyńska's comely pamphlet-thrower ("We have blood, tears, and destruction to avenge"). For contrast, there's the bewildered comrade (Tadeusz Janczar) who agonizes over tangled emotions, kills for the cause, and finds himself on the edge of the precipice. Between them is the uprising and burning of the Jewish ghetto, a credibly awkward excursion into a tavern to shoot a Gestapo officer, paintings hawked amid the rubble, and Roman Polanski still in short pants. Closer to the deep-focus clutter of The Third Man than to the fragmented astringency of Rome, Open City, Wajda's Warsaw is a striking panorama of burgeoning political consciences inescapably weighed down by calculated Film School Shots (a cutout cupid's view of doomed lovers, the sky above the fairgrounds blackened by ominous smoke). Expressive anxiety nevertheless trumps obligatory jingoism—beaming youngsters line up for an Eastern Bloc poster in the censors-patting finale, yet the lingering feeling remains the panic in Janczar's eyes. With Ryszard Kotys, Ludwik Benoit, Zygmunt Zintel, and Zbigniew Cybulski. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |