User Reviews

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 new film Walesa: Man of Hope is a biography poised between critical historiography and hagiography. It presents Walesa as canny but (comically) arrogant and seemingly uneducated except by his experience, and it poses the question, who is the real hero, Walesa himself as Solidarity's leader or the social movement of which he was a part? With the closing scene, Wajda abandons all efforts at a critical perspective, which in any case were during the previous two hours entirely focused on questions of biography, the larger setting of the conflict between the state apparatus and its functionaries and the striking workers (to my mind the more interesting aspect of the film; documentary newsreels are seamlessly mixed with recreations involving the title character and some clips from the far-superior Man of Iron, similarly a semi-documentary but made while the events were in progress) having been simplified into obviousness. The film ends with Walesa appearing to speak before an adulatory US Congress and saying something about freedom. By invoking the central ideolegeme of the United States and its empire, which appropriated the consequences of the workers' revolution in Poland as constituting its own triumph in the Cold War, an ideology's that, notwithstanding its real if limited truth, is usually wielded in an empty and cynical manner (as it had been in attacking third world movements for socialism and national liberation in the name of countering the power of the USSR), Wajda plays into the hands of a regime that he like many Eastern Europeans understandably prefers, perhaps because the Poles were effectively occupied by the Russians, unlike, for example, the people of Vietnam or Chile. Communism was not ended by a great man, neither Walesa nor Pope John Paul nor Gorbachev nor Reagan, but by the struggles of Polish workers, and later the peoples of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere who followed them, and the film does acknowledge this, presenting Walesa as as much an embattled figurehead as anything. The great comic irony is that in a self-proclaimed worker's state it was the workers who brought about change; this was a worker's revolution in a society built on the lie that it was based on one. You want a worker's state? We'll show you worker's power! But this film has too much to say about one man and not enough about history and politics. Though Walesa says at least one very interesting thing in his interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, herself a celebrity: he became an activist because all his life he has been angry, and paradoxically his anger, which he never really displays in the film, though he does show resolve and determination, gave him, he reports, the ability to master all kinds of situations and to be a leader. He says some cynical thinks about the leader's relationship to the people he leads; there are faint hints in this film of a critical perspective on Poland after the end of Communism, but even more than the events depicted on the screen, these are entirely filtered through the character of one man, who is tragically flawed in ways that happily prove comic. This is an excellent film about the struggle of the Polish workers against the Communist state, and a merely very interesting one about this one great man. Since everyone agrees that he is that, this portrait of him may have some value and some appeal. Thank God Walesa isn't shown to be perfect; great men and women rarely are, and perhaps when we advance to the point that all people showing signs of alienation mixed with resolve and creativity are caught in early childhood and sent to therapists for behavioral correction, maybe then people will have to make history without extraordinary leaders. Maybe his flawed character is the reason his role in these events was different from that of the Pope. The film also is notable for showing a busy political leader whose pretty wife mainly wants to live an ordinary life, and knows that politics and everyday life are in principle incompatible.

Film is supposed to show Walesa as a polish hero. When watching dokumentaries it's clear that he was a selfish egocentric hard to communicate man within "Solidarnosc" union. Film is a pure fantasy. Today's documents say that he might have collaborate with polish KGB. Instead jumping through the fence (he cannot specify where exactly) he was delivered by KGB officers from the watersite. The fact that today no one is left by his site from old Solidarity people, except of those, who made big fortunes tells also a lot. After he called in 2012 to beat "Solidarity" protesting on Warsaw streets, he doesn't deserve any movie at all. It turned out that Falacci was right. Besides Wajda calling to domestic war because his opponents can win tells for itself. Friend made a film about friend spending public founds granted by friends.