L'interrogatorio

Occasionally a film about which you know nothing comes along and knocks you down. This is even more remarkable when it is 30 years old. It is what in Poland they call a polkownik or 'shelf movie', that is to say a film that was so explosive it had to be put on a shelf and not shown. Bugajski made Interrogation/Przesluchanie in Poland in 1982 and finished principal photography a week before martial law was declared. He then buried the film, literally, in order to keep it from being destroyed. With the end of Polish Communism it resurfaced in 1989, being premiered in the UK in 1990, and was the official Polish entry at Cannes in 1990. The story is compelling: in 1951 a young woman, Tonia Dziwisz, is arrested when she is drunk, and thrown into prison where the UBeks, a major and Lieutenant Morawski, try to force her to spill the beans on Olcha, a war resistance hero she had slept with, in a way that would condemn him to death, regardless of whether what she said was true or false. But it is not just the story that compels, but the way it is made. Much of it is in close-up, a style I am normally wary of, but Bugajski uses it to convey the visceral nature of mental and physical torture. There are some medium shots in the film, and towards the end a long shot is used to convey how distant the outside world has become. But mostly we see the faces of both victims and torturers wrestling with inner demons. Is it true? Yes. It starts in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon territory, and develops into a cat-and-mouse psychological thriller. I think fiction takes over here, but it only shows how fiction is more powerful and more true than fact. I never have nightmares, but this film gave me one. Highly recommended.

Ryszard Bugajski's Interrogation ("Przesluchanie")gives a vivid portrayal of life in 1950's Poland under the oppressive Stalinist regime. The protagonist of the film, Tonia, is arrested by the secret police and imprisoned for "conspiring" with her Russian friend Colonel Kazik Olcha. Her efforts to disprove these fabricated claims as fallacy are futile as she is continually interrogated. Tonia's overly feminine nature secures her position as a victim of the regime, while the masculine brutality adopted by her interrogators draw parallels with Stalins oppressive dictatorship. This harrowing portrayal of a flawed and inhumane system is more than mere fiction, the director having to escape Poland with only one copy of the film text in his possession.

Unlike the reviewer "carioca-6," I have never seen this film available in the U.S. for rent or sale in any video format. It is not available from Netflix as of early 2008. I have seen it only once, when I lived in Detroit. Living near the border, I could pick up some Canadian stations, and "The Interrogation" was shown probably in late 1991 on the old TVOntario series "Film International" hosted by Jay Scott. Nevertheless, so riveting was this film that I have never forgotten it. Within the first couple of minutes, the film establishes that Tonia is a young pretty blonde---she is a wife and mother but doesn't seem to take this role too seriously--who is apolitical (risky in Communist Poland) and mostly out to have a good time. Without warning or reason, the film plunges her into a Kafkaesque nightmare of arrest, interrogation, conviction and imprisonment. She loses her youth, her health, everything but her own inner resources, and as the outside world forgets her, she develops dignity and a will to survive. Still worth seeing, despite the collapse of the government under which it was made, as a character portrait and a study of man's inhumanity to (wo)man. There are places on Earth where this still goes on, and they are not so far away as we'd like to think.

Young cabaret dancer and singer married to an intellectual, are subtly deceived and is arrested by the secret police Polish imprisons her in a women's prison. Here suffered repeated beatings and interrogations in order to make them confess to the alleged anti- nationalist, remaining segregated together with the other held for several years, until the end of Stalinist period. Only those who have lived under the oppressive cloak of an autocratic regime can not conceive the horror and distaste for oppression and brutalization of conscience that comes from the climate of suspicion and coercion of a Stalinist system. The thirty-nine years old director Ryszard Bugajski from Warsaw tell us about it with daring and difficult work that produced a few years before the collapse of Soviet bloc, had to hide because of the ostracism and persecution by the authorities Polish. Forced to emigrate to Canada he made in VHS circular at first, until his distribution in 1989 and into the limelight in Cannes in 1990. This is a work rigorous and required where there is a reference, in the exemplary story of a young patriot, the tragedy and absurdity surreal lived by whole genarations of Polish citizens who passed the occupation and horrors of Nazism to the permutation of a cruel and inhuman tyranny in ruthless monster of a Stalinist regime, the generous sacrifice for their country during the war, the disintegration of their national identity through perverse gears of insinuating control by Polish authorities themselves. The onset of a poignant hymn of love for their country (the beautiful 'Piosenka o mojej Warszawie') in the verses and notes sung by the boys who return from the front is the sad prelude to a generation betrayed by being cruel and mocking the history.The look of the young Bugajski rests on the faces and bodies of the tortured protagonist with cold clarity of a cruel realism, the dissection of the dark evil of a nation reduced to the yoke of a dark presence and immanent rushes individuals hell Kafkaesque a mousetrap. The prison (jail) female hold the cold and damp a great drifting ship where men and mice are forced to necessary cohabitation in Desperate to escape an unlikely, wrecks animated bodies that crave the gasping salvation. In tight spaces a subtle promiscuity reveals the design of a perverse inhuman coercion, it stirs up the dark machinations that sets man against man, a cruel game and sadist who delves in the lowest depths of degradation of man. Rare concessions to symbolism (the seeds on the window sill of watered with spit from desperate cellmates) and to easy melodramatic rhetoric, in this microcosm retraces the tragic fate of a woman stripped of the visible signs of his dignity until complete isolation from his past (the fight for his country, the relationship with her husband and his world) and its future (the child who The first being torn from the womb and then the arms) and yet maintains the integrity of fair who does not abdicate the betrayal or the break-up of his own humanity. The stages of events momentous mark the time of the prison of Antonina Dziwisz Between the 34th anniversary of the October Revolution and the end of the great Soviet tyranny. Prize for the best actress at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival for his extraordinary protagonist Krystina Janda. Unappreciated gem of Polish cinema.

I first saw "Przesluchanie" ("Interrogation") in the late 'eighties on Channel 4. It is an incomparable, original work of brilliance which has since been mimicked (Kieslowski's "Decalogue" and "Schindler's List" among others) but never bettered. This is REAL filmmaking. See it, if and when you can.