Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Long before I lived anywhere with access to art-house cinema (in the bad old days before Netflix!) I knew that Andrzej Wajda's "Ashes and Diamonds" was a staple. I only got around to watching it and his trilogy of tragic films set in Poland around the end of the Second World War-- Pokolenie (A Generation, 1955), Kanal (1957), and Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds 1958)--relatively recently. That Wajda (born in 1926) made films implicitly--but unmistakably to Polish audiences of the time--critical of the Soviet Union and its Polish puppets is and remains amazing (on top of them being gripping dramas with striking black-and-white images). He made two of the three after the Soviet crackdown following the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

Those three films put Poland on the map of world cinema during the mid-1950s. Since then, Roman Polanski and Krzysztof Kieslowski have attracted more attention and acclaim, but Wajda (who was active in Solidarity beginning in 1981) did not disappear... or stop making films with more than a political edge--actual bites at the Polish regime and its erasures of history, including that of Polish true believers in socialism and progress. In 1961, he filmed "Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District," a work personally banned by Stalin, as The Siberian Lady Macbeth.. The only other film by Wajda I'd seen that was made after that was "Danton" (1983), shot in French with Gérard Dépardieu, and, obviously, about a revolution eating its own heroes/leaders.

The 1977 "Czlowiek z marmuru" (Man of Marble) also concerns the vagaries of adulation and debasement of a socialist hero, a "lead worker," Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who was eager to build a modern, industrial Poland and World War II. Being very photogenic, he was filmed smashing the record for bricklaying (the team he led laid more than 30,000 in a shift) and then went around the country showing others (many of them not at all keen to learn) how to increase productivity.

In addition to being filmed in many newsreels, Birkut also posed for a heroic statue in the socialist realist style--hence the "man of marble." After being used by the party, he was discarded and disgraced. Those who had besmirched his teammate, Wincenty Witek (Michal Tarkowski) fell from power and were themselves condemned, so that Birkut and Witek were rehabilitated. Witek was prepared to play the games of gaining power in the shifting currents of party dogma. Birkut was fed up and disappeared from public view, taking a new name.

His story is pierced together, "Citizen Kane" style, by a lanky blonde young film-maker, Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda). Her project makes everyone uneasy--not only those who knew Birkut but those running the government-owned and -controlled film industry. At first, she seems an intrepid Searcher After Truth. I guess that she remains that, but her ruthlessness in stalking people, using hidden cameras and microphones, persisting in interrogating Hanka (Krystyna Zachwatowicz), a sports star who left Birkut after he was arrested, etc. make me come to regard her as more than a little of a monster. She is ready to use her beauty to get an interview with a film director and to counterfeit female solidarity and sympathy to cajole Hanka into talking to her (while covertly recording the conversation).

There is no "Rosebud" moment, and the ending is IMHO unnecessarily equivocal for viewers who have invested 160 minutes in watching Agnieszka's hunt for Birkut. That cost the film a star in my rating. The deconstruction of how the regime built up and tore down proletarian heroes is, nonetheless, brilliant. Since the regime the cynicism of which was shown in Wadja's film (and in Agnieska's) was still very much in power, I am astonished that it was made and released.

Krystyna Janda and Jerzy Radziwilowicz delivered genuinely great performances of considerable complexity. Zdzislaw Kozien is delightful as Agnieszka's father, getting her off the couch when she has despaired, and Michal Tarkowski provides able support (in a character whose actions and motivations remain obscure).

The mixture of pseudo-archival black-and-white propaganda films and hard-edged 1970s desaturated color cinematography of Edward Klosinsk (who also shot the moody period piece "Gloomy Sunday") also deserves special praise. The tracking shots through long corridors fits the American paranoid thriller style of the day quite remarkably.

© 2007, Stephen O. Murray



Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD