Cenere e diamanti

This film shows an alternative lost youth to that of 1950's America. In the late 1940's and early 1950's some of Poland's teenagers were involved in a life and death struggle against the Soviet and Communist Polish authorities. these young people had been raised in the bloodshed of WWII and had learned to fight and die.

The film shows the lost youth of Poland struggling to find a way to leave this vicious upbringing and return to a normality which they often didn't ever have.

The film's hero wants to return to being a student and having romances and friends after years of fighting for the Polish underground (this is why he wears sunglasses, because his eyesight was damaged fighting in tunnels during the Warsaw Uprising), however he has a mission to kill a communist officer...

The film is amazing, the imagery reflects the detruction and sorrow of this lost generation. The direction and acting are superb. Like a previous poster, however, I was a little dis-satisfied with the ending, which differed from the book. That is a trivial point, though.

At its most basic, Andrzej Wajda's "Popiol i diament" (called "Ashes and Diamonds" in English) may seem to be a look at where Poland would be going after WWII ended. The plot involves young Maciek Chelmicki (Zbigniew Cybulski), who has helped expel the Nazis from Poland. With the Soviet Union now taking over the country, he is ordered to shift his allegiance to them. Through Maciek's acquaintances with communist leader Szczuka and barmaid Krzystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska), a potentially explosive situation arises.

If you know nothing about how the movie got made, this seems to be the whole purpose. But there are other points. In a mini-documentary about the movie, Andrzej Wajda and his collaborators explain how the novel on which the movie is based had Szczuka as the main character. Wajda not only moved the focus to Maciek - and gave him sort of a James Dean look - but also stressed the scene where Maciek talks with the man who fought in the Spanish Civil War. Apparently, fighting like the man did is a Polish tradition. Therefore, the film likely appeals to the Poles in almost every way; the perfect Polish movie, if you will.

Although I've never seen any of Andrzej Wajda's other movies - hell, I'd never heard of him until the Academy Awards gave him an honorary Oscar - I staunchly recommend this one. One can clearly see how he used the movie to subtly challenge the Soviet domination of his country (of course, they couldn't openly say anything against the USSR). Poland's pro-Soviet government had approved the movie, but didn't want to let it outside Poland. Wajda got some people to smuggle it out of the country, and it reached much of the world. Probably the most amazing scene is the end. I won't spoil the end, but I'll note that blood on a white sheet looks a bit like Poland's flag (a nationalistic statement).

All in all, a great movie. Andrzej Wajda has every reason to be proud of it.

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.

Surely the most mature of the trilogy; it's certainly the most elliptical and stylistically audacious. At the start, Cybulski is a laidback, coldly cynical assassin who lolls on his back in a field waiting to carry out his latest hit; suffering a crisis of confidence in light of his awakening love for a woman, he flirts with desertion before resigning himself to the demands of his position. His personal journey speaks eloquently to the national trauma, and he's just the most prominent in a complex collection of transition figures, caught on the official last night of the war, now looking forward but not yet able to escape the ravages of war and the attendant moral and psychological confusion, not yet free of potential victimhood (like the mayor's assistant who on learning of his boss' promotion drinks excessively in celebration of his own presumed advancement, but in his disruptive drunkenness kills off what future he had). The ending, intercutting a personal tragedy with the dancers doing the elegant polannaise in the streaming light of dawn, like disembodied Felliniesque figures, perfectly encapsulates the film's mix of toughness and allusiveness.

First, I've read a book by Jerzy Andrzejewski and then I've seen the movie. After that, I never went back to the book. It was not because it was bad, quite the contrary - it was very good. But the movie by Andrzej Wajda is definitely a masterpiece of Polish movie-making. The main plot of the movie revolves around Maciek Chelmicki, a young idealist who fought against the Germans and then turned to fight against the Communists. He is sent to kill Szczuka, one of The Party's middle rank administrators, by the Polish underground.That's the plot. The movie itself is about a lot of important things, common to all people (but I believe the Polish people will find a few of them more emotionally binding):

1. Nothing is black or white, everything is just a shade of gray

2. Is death, no matter how you try to justify it, senseless?

3. Is it better to live, while on your knees or die standing straight? Or maybe it's better to try to live standing straight?

4. That sometimes it's not war that is hell, it's living through war and trying to live a normal life that is a lot harder (thank God I do not know if it is so)

Wajda's movie doesn't give direct answers to any of these questions - each person may watch the movie from a different point of view and get to a totally different conclusion. But even if you're not into psychological movies about war, or noir-movies (and Popiol i Diament is definitely a sort of a noir-movie) it's worth watching for just one scene - the burning vodka glasses at the bar - Cybulski at his best.

And lastly - the motto of the movie (and of the book as well):

"Will ash and chaos be left in the end, that follows a storm into abyss Or may a diamond be found in the ash, a dawn of an everlasting victory"

Cyprian Kamil Norwid

PS: I hope Mr Norwid will not turn in his grave at the quality of my translation but that part of a poem by CK Norwid sums up the movie really well.