Pan Tadeusz

Although I am Polish by extraction, I had never read or been told the story of this great, early 19th century Polish classic poem. To my delight the tale of rustic Lithuania, at the time of Napoleon is exciting, warm, tender and just sweeps you off your feet.

The dialogue is drawn directly from the poem so it is in rhyming couplets. The acting styles and set design marvelously match the romantic, expressive language. The poem was published in 1834 and Adam Miczkiewicz was, I understand, influenced by Walter Scott. The English subtitles fail the film badly. They should have taken the risk of using a translation in a similar style. Unfortunately, for a non-Polish speaking person, I expect it is like watching Shakespeare translated into the language of the evening news. It looks terrific but a lot of the richness is missed.

The best movie I seen in a long time. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should have made this movie a nominee for the FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM category at the 2000 Oscar's (I think the Academy is biased against such true works of art and history). This movie above all others should have been nominated, what is wrong with the Academy?

Excellent movie! Wajda has done an excellent job. Wajda is indeed the world's greatest movie director. Congratulations to Wajda on the Oscar you deserve it more than anyone else.

Andrzej Wajda has been a great director at least as far back as "Kanal" in 1957. Tough films, provocative themes.

But why the costume drama? I really wish he'd left this one alone.

It's not unlike 1999's other bloated Polish historical epic, "Ogniem i mieczem" ("With Fire and Sword"). Here again Poles put aside their differences to prove they're the greatest people, or at least the greatest Slavs, on Bóg's green earth. Rah, rah. A crowd of Polish lesser gentry (rabble) armed with swords can defeat trained Russian musketry any day.

And, yes, I am of Polish descent myself, although I'm embarrassed to admit it in this jingoistic context. That's why I was at the special screening in the first place, sponsored by Toronto's Polish newspaper.

"Pan Tadeusz" shares another characteristic with its elephantine contemporary: its ability to confuse non-Polish-speaking members of the audience with its vast number of characters and their poorly defined interrelationships.

Both films too have a sudsy quality. So did "Gone With The Wind", but then character definition makes that historical epic a success. Tadeusz and Zosia are indistinct phantoms as personalities. Certainly no Rhett or Scarlett.

"With Fire and Sword" is more melodramatic than "Pan Tadeusz", but it's also more exciting. This film has a laudable grandeur which Wajda brings to the proceedings, but still I wish he'd picked a subject with a bit more substance.

Wojciech Kilar can be congratulated on his score. And Daniel Olbrychski is always good to see, even with scars all over his head.

It should be noted that Polish-speaking spectators at the theatre appeared to find this film quite enjoyable. They would be chuckling at clever turns of phrase in the dialogue, while the English titles would be saying something indescribably prosaic. Evidently the film loses nearly everything in translation.

I don't blame any non-Polish viewers for being confused or simply bored. Not at all. At the moment I'm even trying to imagine how it feels watching this picture without being able to refer anytime to the knowledge of the book and the cultural background. I guess it makes you feel lost and empty-headed.

First of all, the screen play was created in a very unusual way. The dialogs were not written, but extracted from the poem, some of them being full rhyming lines and some only parts. Of course most of the meaningful and informative pieces were in the narrative section of the poem and somehow didn't make it to the screen. I'm all for "show not tell", but "don't show, don't tell, everybody knows it all from school" is not the top shelf of movie-making to me.

All that is shown is pretty people, pretty costumes, pretty interiors, pretty nature. Definitely pleasant to see for anyone who likes pictures with historical settings and would like to get to know something about the life in a particular time and place.

The movie really works only for people who have read the poem and have been taught about its historical background. After such preparation they can enjoy this multimedia reconstruction of the characters and places from the book, because that's rather what it is to me. Indeed, all the actors are good, music memorable and all the details nicely done, but this production really lacks the cinematic backbone and something that would allow it to be a movie on its own.

Pan Tadeusz had a huge impact on Polish audience this year. The film, which was made on a three-million dollar budget, beat all records of popularity in Poland. On the first weekend 420,000 Poles saw the movie. By mid-November more than three million Poles watched Pan Tadeusz in the 130 movie theaters nationwide.

We can expect high popularity level in Lithuania, and, maybe, to some extent in Belarus. But otherwise, the movie will be overlooked and probably discarded by the people who are not familiar with the history of the region, namely, with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the union with Recz Pospolita (The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth).

For Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians this is a movie that brings back poignant nostalgia for the glorious past of the Duchy. For everyone else, it is just another historical ballad, based on the classical poem of Adam Mickiewicz.

The director, Andrzej Wajda, did a wonderful job -- the casting seems almost perfect, the whole organization is very nice, the acting is powerful. Some Polish movie critics predict that the film is going to be nominated for Oscar, but as far as it looks now, it is going to be huge -- but only on a regional scale.