La cicatrice

Nominally, this is a movie about a quaint town in Poland where the local communist party hack lobbies to bring a chemical factory to town.

He uses dubious photos of impoverished locals to convince his fellow local party flunkies that the town desperately needs jobs. Then he brings in the regional party hacks for lobbying, and has a bunch of locals stand outside the offices to show their support for the factory (it's implied they were actually told it was a demonstration AGAINST the factory).

And on it goes like this, with our main character being appointed from out of town, against his wife's wishes, to head up the project.

The project bulldozes a forest. The party flunkies condescend to the locals, with their social and ecological concerns. Our main character expresses his misgivings. But at no time does the project - a nitrate factory - ever slow down. It's all in service of The Party, you see.

The amazing this is, however, is that the theme of this movie transcends its time and place.

Think about Your Town, where the local billionaire sports team owner paid off the local town council so he could bulldoze a few downtown city blocks, get a new arena/stadium built at taxpayers' expense, and then spread the manure of ''revitalization" to sell the concept to the locals.

Billionaire gets richer. Councillors put their kids through college. Contractors get rich. Tradesmen get jobs for a couple of years. Poor people stay poor. And the town is left to clean up the social and ecological long-term damage.

Today, towns and states rush to built light rail transit projects. Rinse and repeat.

There's no ranting and raving or pounding of fists. No car chases or gun play. Just a man trying to navigate his way through a system. The genius is that this system persists everywhere, across all ideologies.

The director himself might have thought he'd made a bad film. Maybe in the immediate aftermath, with ambitions to do more polished work, he was justified in his self-criticism. But with the perspective of 50 years I'd say he turned out a timeless masterpiece. It makes anything cranked out by serial polemicist Michael Moore look like cheap home-made fluff by comparison.

I cannot think of another film that so violates the founding principal of Cinema 101...show, do not tell...as consistently and completely as does this dull, bleak Polish offering from Kryztof Kieslowski. Just one long, uninvolving scene after another of Communist Party apartachik Stefan Bednarz wrestling with his conscience while being told of worker discontent at the nitrate factory he runs. At no point do we actually see the bad work place conditions that are causing the problems with which Bednarz, to mention nothing of the workers, who remain largely faceless, nameless and voiceless, is struggling. What we do see, repetitively and wearyingly, are shots of Bednarz grimacing, sighing, and looking bereft and forlorn as he smokes (did I mention this is a Polish film?) and drinks and gazes inward which may work in a novel or a play but is not gonna cut it on film. Oh, and the stuff with Bednarz and his daughter, where Kieslowski is trying to go mainstream, is like The Socialist Lifetime Channel. C plus.

Kiewslowski's first film is an impressive study on a man who has been thrown in the deep end and put in charge of a Factory that the locals don't want. This is a very subtle and effective attack on the hypocritical Communist party.

Engineer Franciszek Pieczka is deputed to take over the construction of a factory in a small city in Poland. Although there are problems with the plans, he sets to work with a will. Soon, however, he finds opposition from the locals whose lives are disrupted, or can't get jobs on the project. As the project haltingly advances, the opposition grows, and he finds himself in conflict with the Party and the unions.

Krzysztof Kieslowski's first feature often has a documentary feel to it, but it's more of a character study. Pieczka is a technocrat, someone who knows how to get things done in terms of taking plans and allocating resources, but cannot factor in the personalities and conflicts of people into his equations. His relationship with his wife is a long-distance one; with his daughter, a criticized one. Although Kieslowski was later dissatisfied with the movie as an artifact of "social realism", and blamed the script, Pieczka's performance makes it very watchable.

I only got the idea of this movie on the second time I saw it. It is actually like a documentary of a fictious character (or who knows he didn't exist) living in a socialist Poland who is being commissioned to conduct a new chemical factory. The movie shows quite realistic portrait of a man who tries to keep his values in order in the middle of all corruption and chaos of different social movements of the time. The movie doesn't go into any character's side actually, but tries to display the difficulties of the system and how an individual is powerless in many ways.

The storytelling is very slow and at times a bit jumpy. The music scenes of the movie, that are very rare, are quite bizarre, almost eerie.

I cannot recommend the movie to anyone who tend to fall asleep in slow dramas, but those who like other Kieslowsky films or documentaries of socialism, this is an interesting flick.