gerardbalsley

This is one of those movies that convince me of the medium's universality. Wajda is using his skills in emulation of Hollywood examples (for example, the tenebrous lighting reminiscent of fashionable noir movies and the deep focus honed by Orson Welles and Gregg Toland), but his story is genuinely about post-war Poland and is intensely personal and honest. In Zbigniew Cybulski, he has an actor who catches the director's personal feelings about the War and what has happened to his homeland, his bravery struggling against the ambiguity and despair brought on by war weariness and soviet betrayal. We see the sociology of the moment, from the hotel clerk's nostalgia for Warsaw, now ruined, to the hardened barmaid, who wants desperately to believe in love. The whole spectrum is sampled, from the ineffectual old leaders to the vicious soviet man who assists the targeted Sczcuka, himself a decent but conflicted character. It's remarkable that Wajda got the film made despite his soviet minders.

The visual trope of reproducing Vermeer's light is winning, but it just doesn't fill ninety minutes. The film is so slow, it seems thirty minutes longer than it really is. Period verisimilitude is nice, but do we need to have so much 17th century architectural tenebrism that you wonder if the projection lamp is terminally ill? Was language as strangled in Vermeer's Delft as it is in this movie? And what was Griet's stand-up deflowering by Pieter all about anyway? Would she rather lose her virginity to him rather than the lecherous van Ruijven or was it just gratuitously slathered onto a dead narrative?