Die Passagierin

Passenger is a Polish film about a German ex-officer at a concentration camp who sees someone she believes to be an ex-inmate on board a cruise ship. From there, she recounts her experience during the war, and the odd dynamic she had with this one particular prisoner.

It only runs an hour long, and is very upfront about the fact it's an unfinished film, due to the director suddenly dying during production. The people who picked up the pieces and edited into what it is today try to work this into the film via a narration which adds some subtext, and tries to link what happened to the film to the themes of the film's story, to mixed results.

I guess an attempt at acknowledging the film's backstory and working it into the film was better than nothing, but it might strain a little in the closing narration (especially when the narrator also stops speaking mid-sentence, then the film ends).

But for what it is, it's still quite good. Might well have been even better had all the scenes been filmed, but there was certainly enough here for a compelling, semi-experimental hour-long film.

In what was to be his final, incomplete film, Andrzej Munk gives an insight into an "island in time", as the narrator calls it. A woman on an ocean cruiser meets what seems to be a person from her own past - a past where she was overseer in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the other a prisoner. They were bond together by a strange link, which in the view of guard (Liza) was generally build up by some sort of respect and protection, whereas the actual events that follow Liza reminiscences leave no doubt about her participation in the inhumanity and her guild. From the point of view of Marta, the surviver (or is it someone else?), the "relationship" was different. Munks pictures show us two sides of the story in a dream-like atmosphere: Black and white, eerie music, haunting pictures. Though a totally different content, the aesthetic atmosphere recalls 'La Jetee' by Chris Marker, filmed around the same time. In all, a short but intense viewing experience that achieves great emotional impact. Way ahead of it's time.

It's difficult to make an accurate assessment of this film because it's incomplete. In fact, it's far from complete. Still, from the pieces of what is left we can see that "Passenger" may well have turned out to be a masterpiece. Like Jean Vigo, Andrzej Munk was considered a cinematic genius who died too soon (in a car crash in 1960). Munk is less well known than Vigo but he is still important, especially in the development of Polish film. "Passenger" is the story of a German woman on a cruise-liner who catches a glimpse of who she believes to be a Jewish girl she was in charge of at a concentration camp during the war. She recounts to her husband in flashback the story of how she tried to protect the girl from her vicious captors. Later on though, in another flashback, we see what really happened: the woman was not the girl's protector, but a sadist who relished her position of authority and her control over the lives of the prisoners she guarded. The cruise-liner scenes are all done using still shots with a narrator (or, the "restorer" of the film) trying to decipher how exactly Munk intended to piece the film together, while the flashback scenes are actual moving images, shot in fine black and white widescreen compositions. As the "narrator" tries to understand the film, what it would have become, so do we as viewers. In this way the film itself becomes perhaps even more labyrinthine than it would have been had Munk completed it, and we have an added level of mystery that is as frustrating as it is exciting. The incomplete film entices us to guess how it would have turned out, and while its certainly not a substitute for the completed film, this fragmented "Passenger" is brilliant and tantalizing nonetheless.

This is an incomplete deeply moving masterpiece. The scenes of Auschwitz are disturbing, of course, but more so set against a genuine human drama involving two women on opposite sides of this evil situation. We see how the best of human sensibility can be drawn out in the worst evil places. We witness mixed motives on the part of our overseer of prisoners. Why is she protective of this one concentration camp victim? We see her drawn to the beauty and the power of this simple woman victimized by this idiotic Nazi policy of confinement. She is also conflicted regarding this simple woman's love for her fiancee, a fellow prisoner.

This is a situation where you can genuinely regret the cruel fate that would deny us this completed film which is so powerful even in the truncated form completed by his colleagues after Munk's death. See this film if you can get a chance.

The first 8 minutes of this black-and-white movie are not representative for the rest of the movie. Since the director of this movie died before he could complete this movie, it is explained that the movie is shown to you in its uncomplete state. First of all they show some photos of the director and start the movie with a photo-based introduction. I assume this is done because this part of the movie was not filmed yet when the director passed away. And this introduction of around 8 minutes is not representative for the rest of the movie. So please take this into account when you start watching this movie.

During watching the movie, other unfinished scenes are also substituted with photos and a voice-over that explains what the original idea was for those missing scenes. But this will be only short "interruptions" that are unlike the first 8 minutes.

What though is completed, are all scenes in the Auschwitz concentration camp. And I must say that it is excellent material. Of all the movies and series that I have ever seen, this movie seems to contain the most accurate of how the camp really looked like. The layout of the ramp, the way arriving people had to walk to get to the crematoria, the downwards stairs that functioned as the entrance of the gas chambers... they are all like the real Auschwitz.

Even the infamous and much feared "Block 11" - the so-called "death block" - is shown in the movie. This block is where many people ended up being killed or tortured to death. The movie also has an accurate view of the "death wall", which is used for shooting people. And it is the first time that I see the so-called "standing cells", with its low doors that people had to crawl through to enter. Cells where people were left standing many days with no possibility whatsoever to lie down. And people where left in such conditions - in the dark and even without food - until they died an agonizing death.

One may think that it is an unattractive watch because the movie is black-and-white. Another pretty valid argument may be that the movie is unfinished and with its 1 hour duration doesn't even meet the 1.5 hour duration of the typical feature-length movie. But I think we have here an excellent opportunity to see how life in Auschwitz may have been like. So I therefore think that it belongs in any serious list of WW2 movies.

I am not going to give away the details of the storyline itself, which would spoil the watch. I though want to say, what I think that the purpose of this movie is. And it is to show how warped the reality of some SS camp guards is. And that, even many years after the war ended.

I really get the idea that the director wants to show us that there were SS guards that saw some people as their personal pets (or personal slaves). It is those same guards that "play around" with these "pets" until they lose interest and kill them. As such, this movie shows not only the overal inhumane conditions of life in Auschwitz, but also the large differences in how people were treated.

Combined with some very decent acting, this movie deserves a score of 6.5/10, thereby just barely making it an IMDb rating of 7 stars. And of course I needed to include the facts that it is incomplete. But this score is in my opinion very decent for its current state.

Were it not for the untimely death of the director, I think we would have ended up with an 8-star IMDb movie that would have been known to a large public.