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A flight attendant's bilingual announcements fill the disorientating first close-up, customs clearance is a tableau under flickering lights—the airport as No Man's Land, portal between Warsaw and London. The four touring Poles are really illegal laborers in town to renovate the boss' home, only the foreman (Jeremy Irons) knows English, uneasily in charge of budget, provisions, nosy neighbors. Work is rough and the air is wintry, a phone booth provides the sole link home, he marvels at the technology with wry paranoia ("If our conversation was taped, it must be a good recording"). He learns of Martial Law and, to keep the project going, conceals the news from his comrades, ripping up letters and tearing down posters. "Solidarity, kaput!" Poland behind the Iron Curtain and England behind the Iron Lady, thus Jerzy Skolimowski's great, sad, angry comedy of dislocation. Christmastime in alien terrain, strange aisles and altars and display windows, a cameo by De Sica's bicycle. Masterly details enrich the suggestive allegory: A surveillance camera hangs over the supermarket floor like a porcupine satellite, the workers vent their frustrations with axes on plaster walls until the house fights back with exploding pipes and faulty wires. "I can speak their language. But I don't really know what they mean." On the grainy TV screen an interrupted soccer match, then tanks rolling onto Polish streets, finally the girlfriend in the snapshot that comes to life in an ominous glint of La Jetée. "Self-respect" is the foreman's point of consideration, by the end he's become shoplifter, censor, imagined cuckold and oppressor of his own proletarian class, splendidly enacted by Irons with perplexed deadpan gravity. It builds to a confession in the void, and a push of revolt in limbo. "So much for daydreams." Curious echoes turn up in Spielberg's The Terminal. With Eugene Lipinski, Jiri Stanislav, Eugeniusz Haczkiewicz, Denis Holmes, and Jenny Seagrove.
--- Fernando F. Croce |