Chiffre

A father searches for his missing son as a way of reconnecting with his estranged wife and son. He has become rather wealthy and affluent due to business dealings abroad but at what cost? His remaining son makes do with being a taxi driver and taking care of his ill mother. He cannot seem to fathom how his son has become the way he has and wants to find easy answers that cannot be grasped at. He must come to terms with what he has left behind and what his family have had to deal with in that space of time.

Only Wojciech Has could make a film like this. That grasped at the complexities of warfare but from a psychological frame of mind rather than the battlefields. This is a film that takes a look at people on the sidelines looking on and the damage that it has done for them, the bit-part players and the fading memories that live on within them.

My third movie of the day considering 00:00 hrs as the origin, this was a real gem. Wojciech Has is a director I first heard of when The Saragossa Manuscript was suggested to me as "one of the best films ever made", and that was last week, after which I looked into his work and spotted a few interesting ones I would like to grab. And this was my first Has film and it was awesome. This is a unique war film, completely based on memories, and that transforms this drama into a mystery. A father is looking for his son who was arrested (/killed?) 20 years back and never heard of since, and his search is totally based on near extinct, sometimes overlapping, recollections and only recollections. Truth is obscured, as the father takes the journey through other people's memories to construct a logical flow of events. In his search, he reaches places he never knew existed, and discovers himself, his wife and his sons a little better. The way the story is told bears the signs of an accomplished filmmaker who does it with both technique and emotion. He introduces subtle twists in the narrative, and in a silent manner truth becomes coded and impossible to arrive at. But strangely, as the motive gets farther, other truths that were lingering in the darkness come to the fore, and makes the motive somehow redundant to die for. The director tries to question the very nature of memories and shows us how they can be misleading bits to a much greater picture, and also tries to give us the timeworn lesson of 'letting things go'. And when you add to it the surreal sequences of the boy in a medieval forest amidst war, snow and executions, you get a film that is mysterious, tragic and immersed in the mental ravages of war.