WALESA, MAN OF HOPE ANDRZEJ WAJDA - 2013
Andrzej Wajda's most recent film, Walesa, Man of Hope, is certainly thought provoking and can be interpreted in various ways. On the most obvious, superficial level, it is about the birth of the Solidarity movement (Solidarność) and the political rise of its top leader Lech Walesa. Wajda resorts to documentaries of that period interweaving facts and fiction in a harmonious, skillful way. As a Russian journalist put it, in the future no one else would be capable of making a film like this depicting those times in such a faithful manner.
However from a psychological point of view, the film might be trying to resolve a dire dilemma: to what extent was Walesa forced to collaborate with the communist regime? Wajda seems to suggest that despite Walesa's possible initial weakness – signing a document by which he agreed to "have talks" with secret agents - it is undeniable that his subsequent opposition to the regime was authentic and very courageous and that the freedom and independence of Poland after more than 44 years of communist domination can be undoubtedly attributed to his extraordinary success as a mass leader. We should not forget, furthermore, that the defeat of the Kremlin gang ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
To what point can one resist torture? Physical, psychological? To Walesa it might have meant exposing his family, wife and children, to all kinds of persecution. What torture can achieve we witnessed in those famous Stalinist trials. There the condemned confessed to anything and were shot dead.
One of the heroes of the Polish Resistance Movement (Armia Krajowa – AK) , during WWII, Witold Pilecki, went to Auschwitz as a volunteer to try to organize resistance nuclei in the concentration camp, which, by the way, he succeeded in doing in a spectacular way. After the war, he was arrested and tortured by the communist regime in Poland, "confessed" to having conspired against the People's Republic and was condemned to death. He, who had managed to survive the horror of a concentration camp, was cruelly defeated by his own countrymen.
Andrzej Wajda approaches thus another not less painful theme. Our guards in Pawiak prison in Warsaw (1942/1943) were not German, they were Ukrainian. In Polanski's The Pianist the ghetto police was Jewish. And in Vichy France the henchmen of the French were French as well.
Thus both Hitler and Stalin used the people of the occupied countries to impose the most horrendous kind of totalitarianism: fratricide.
When Danuta Walesa comes back from the Nobel Prize ceremony she is told at the airport by the customs officer to undress completely to check whether she was not smuggling in anything. She became the victim of most brutal humiliation, but not at the hands of the Russians but of her own countrymen.
Dark Ages? But when, well back in the past or just around the corner?
Yet there are also lighter moments. Walesa is arrested when union propaganda is found in the pram he is pushing with a baby inside. Already in the cell, with the babe crying loudly, a woman guard comes in and at once notices that the child is hungry. Without dithering she opens her blouse and breast feeds the baby. Sort of ill at ease, Walesa asks her: "Why are you wearing this uniform?" "My husband abandoned me and I've got three kids to raise", she answers and having accomplished her "task" leaves the cell. The men on strike inside the Gdansk ship dockyards, completely separated from the outside world, are helped by the population who bring them food and other necessities to help them keep going. Without that help would they have been able to resist the pressure? That, after all, was the solidarity movement, Solidarność, which defeated a dictatorial regime. Solidarność mobilized all the citizens in the country and opened up a new era for Poland and, in a way, for the rest of the world.
Walesa the union leader has his counterpoint in Walesa the husband and father of six children. It is Danuta, his wife, who rules the home. Walesa "in pajamas", dutifully obeys. Danuta is a strong willed, determined, tender woman. It is from her that comes most of the strength of the electrician who, one day, will charm big crowds.
Watching on TV Walesa's triumph, the ex (?) agent, who had been in charge of spying on him, comments to his colleague: "So he managed in the end! Never mind! Someday we'll get him". As in The Man of Iron, Wajda ends in a minor key. However, at the age of 87, it seems he is trying to tell us that a less cynical world can only be founded on truth.
Janusz Glowacki, the author of the screenplay, was recommended to Wajda by Polanski and Pawel Edelman, the cinematographer, has already been awarded several prizes. Their competence only adds to the quality of the feature. As well as the Polish rock music of the 80s, that gives the film a rhythm that matches the background of those eventful years.
Whoever has met Lech Walesa personally may feel that the actor playing him (excellent by the way) lacks his unique charisma, which helped the union leader so much in rousing the crowds. His son, Jaroslaw, thinks the film should not have been made now; that a perspective of no less than forty years might help avoid any kind of comparison between reality and fiction. But who, apart from Andrzej Wajda, would be capable of such a feat?
Rio International Film Festival. Rio De Janeiro, 02 October, 2013. Tomasz Lychowski
Andrzej Wajda's most recent film, Walesa, Man of Hope, is certainly thought provoking and can be interpreted in various ways. On the most obvious, superficial level, it is about the birth of the Solidarity movement (Solidarność) and the political rise of its top leader Lech Walesa. Wajda resorts to documentaries of that period interweaving facts and fiction in a harmonious, skillful way. As a Russian journalist put it, in the future no one else would be capable of making a film like this depicting those times in such a faithful manner.
However from a psychological point of view, the film might be trying to resolve a dire dilemma: to what extent was Walesa forced to collaborate with the communist regime? Wajda seems to suggest that despite Walesa's possible initial weakness – signing a document by which he agreed to "have talks" with secret agents - it is undeniable that his subsequent opposition to the regime was authentic and very courageous and that the freedom and independence of Poland after more than 44 years of communist domination can be undoubtedly attributed to his extraordinary success as a mass leader. We should not forget, furthermore, that the defeat of the Kremlin gang ultimately led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
To what point can one resist torture? Physical, psychological? To Walesa it might have meant exposing his family, wife and children, to all kinds of persecution. What torture can achieve we witnessed in those famous Stalinist trials. There the condemned confessed to anything and were shot dead.
One of the heroes of the Polish Resistance Movement (Armia Krajowa – AK) , during WWII, Witold Pilecki, went to Auschwitz as a volunteer to try to organize resistance nuclei in the concentration camp, which, by the way, he succeeded in doing in a spectacular way. After the war, he was arrested and tortured by the communist regime in Poland, "confessed" to having conspired against the People's Republic and was condemned to death. He, who had managed to survive the horror of a concentration camp, was cruelly defeated by his own countrymen.
Andrzej Wajda approaches thus another not less painful theme. Our guards in Pawiak prison in Warsaw (1942/1943) were not German, they were Ukrainian. In Polanski's The Pianist the ghetto police was Jewish. And in Vichy France the henchmen of the French were French as well.
Thus both Hitler and Stalin used the people of the occupied countries to impose the most horrendous kind of totalitarianism: fratricide.
When Danuta Walesa comes back from the Nobel Prize ceremony she is told at the airport by the customs officer to undress completely to check whether she was not smuggling in anything. She became the victim of most brutal humiliation, but not at the hands of the Russians but of her own countrymen.
Dark Ages? But when, well back in the past or just around the corner?
Yet there are also lighter moments. Walesa is arrested when union propaganda is found in the pram he is pushing with a baby inside. Already in the cell, with the babe crying loudly, a woman guard comes in and at once notices that the child is hungry. Without dithering she opens her blouse and breast feeds the baby. Sort of ill at ease, Walesa asks her: "Why are you wearing this uniform?" "My husband abandoned me and I've got three kids to raise", she answers and having accomplished her "task" leaves the cell. The men on strike inside the Gdansk ship dockyards, completely separated from the outside world, are helped by the population who bring them food and other necessities to help them keep going. Without that help would they have been able to resist the pressure? That, after all, was the solidarity movement, Solidarność, which defeated a dictatorial regime. Solidarność mobilized all the citizens in the country and opened up a new era for Poland and, in a way, for the rest of the world.
Walesa the union leader has his counterpoint in Walesa the husband and father of six children. It is Danuta, his wife, who rules the home. Walesa "in pajamas", dutifully obeys. Danuta is a strong willed, determined, tender woman. It is from her that comes most of the strength of the electrician who, one day, will charm big crowds.
Watching on TV Walesa's triumph, the ex (?) agent, who had been in charge of spying on him, comments to his colleague: "So he managed in the end! Never mind! Someday we'll get him". As in The Man of Iron, Wajda ends in a minor key. However, at the age of 87, it seems he is trying to tell us that a less cynical world can only be founded on truth.
Janusz Glowacki, the author of the screenplay, was recommended to Wajda by Polanski and Pawel Edelman, the cinematographer, has already been awarded several prizes. Their competence only adds to the quality of the feature. As well as the Polish rock music of the 80s, that gives the film a rhythm that matches the background of those eventful years.
Whoever has met Lech Walesa personally may feel that the actor playing him (excellent by the way) lacks his unique charisma, which helped the union leader so much in rousing the crowds. His son, Jaroslaw, thinks the film should not have been made now; that a perspective of no less than forty years might help avoid any kind of comparison between reality and fiction. But who, apart from Andrzej Wajda, would be capable of such a feat?
Rio International Film Festival. Rio De Janeiro, 02 October, 2013. Tomasz Lychowski