Le calme

With SPOKOJ, translated either as 'Calm' or 'Peace', Kieslowski swings back to the depiction of a common man, a lowly and ordinary worker with no special talents and limited ambitions, who never-the-less becomes a middle period 'man in the middle'.

Kieslowski collaborator Jerzy Stuhr plays a man in prison (Antek Gralak, the same name as the central character under Party interrogation in ZYCIORYS 1975) for a trifling offense who never the less is chastened by the experience and vows to remake his life. It pares it down to the essentials. He's going to get a job, a roof over his head, food in his belly and a woman and start a family.

He already has a woman picked out, a farmer's daughter who gave him a drink of water (seen in flashback) when he was working on a labor project outside the prison. His term up he returns to Krakow and, studiously avoiding his prison mates, turns around and goes back to Silesia where he gets a job for a construction outfit. He is very humbly grateful to his boss for giving him the job despite his criminal record and he develops a certain affectionate dependency on him. He finds a place to live in a boarding house. The landlady takes an interest in him, taking him for some respectable clothes and sleeping with him, but is cruelly disappointed when he proposes and is accepted by the farmer's daughter. He becomes fully integrated with his workmates to the extent of getting blind drunk with them.

He marries the Farmer's daughter and manages to to set up an apartment with a TV and she gets pregnant and Antek is actually happy. All along the way there are tiny signs that things are not all that they should be on the worksite. He turns up one morning and no one is working because the materials haven't arrived yet. They seem resentful of the boss and Antek tries to mediate. The materials arrive a bit short. Later the losses mount up and the boss tries to dock his workers to make up for the extra expenses which causes open grumbling amongst the workers which leads to an all out stoppage- a strike. Antek tries to mediate again by getting the boss to rescind the docking of the pay and the boss shows him that it really won't result in anyone losing any money because its all just shifting things from one pile to the other.

The workers hold a strike meeting scheduled for the same time the boss is giving a party. Antek has to decide which one to go to and chooses the bosses 'party' which turns out to be a planning session of the boss and his criminal associates who cynically plan to fire the 'grumblers' and blame the theft of building materials on them. Antek denounces them angrily and marches out. He goes to the workers meeting where he is marked as a traitor and beaten up.

In general, Kieslowski has denied that he was making deliberate metaphors. He believed as long as he was making films with some truth in them, that he was dealing with reality in an honest way, then it was up to people to make their own metaphors. SPOKOJ can be seen as a metaphor for the specific situation in Poland at the time, where the boss is 'the party', corrupt and inefficient, and which blames the workers for all of its problems.

Then again I saw a documentary on the Homestead Steel Strike of 1892 and the meeting at the boss's house could have been taken from the meeting between Carnegie, Frick and Pinkerton. With Kieslowski events are rendered in such a way that even though they are specific to the story they represent eternal conflicts and human behavior so they are universally applicable. It's no wonder that he would go on to make his masterpiece, DEKALOG (1988/9) where the absorbing dramas were still relevant as cautionary commandments though sometimes one wondered just which commandment was being illustrated.

It's Kieslowski's strength that decades and centuries from now, when only university Phd's know the specific political references to 1956 or 1981, that the stories will still ring true. People act this way, organizations act that way, society is organized just so.

There is what seems to be the beginning of a formal mannerism noticeable in Kieslowski's narratives, the presentation of characters with no background given, which reaches it apogee in DEKALOG (1987/8). This devise causes the feeling engendered in the viewer of -"Who is that guys and what's he doing and why is he doing that." It all gets explained eventually but it causes the viewer to either drift off and leave the film or to become a participant, to theorize and reevaluate ones initial ideas as more information becomes available.

In this story we see perhaps Kieslowski's most negative interpretation of people. The protagonist has purposely circumscribed his life to the most basic elements in an effort to achieve these limited goals and therefore to be 'happy'. He is taken to task and this would echo in Kieslowski's study of a night watchman, Z PUNKTU WIDZENIA NOCNEGO PORTIERA (1978) and find final fruition in his critical third story in PRZYPADEK (1987) (BLIND CHANCE). The boss is avuncular but a total con man and crook. The workers are ill tempered and argumentative and always on knife edge, ready to think the worst and prepared to act violently as a mob even if it resolves nothing, a criticism to be fully explored in KRÓTKI DZIEN PRACY (1981).

In the end Antek lies bleeding in the mud in his good suit muttering 'Sporoj'. There is a strange kinship with Brando in ON THE WATERFRONT (1954) also about a corrupt boss and a compromised worker caught in the middle.

For only his second feature film, 'The Calm' is really quite impressive. It is nowhere near among Kieslowski's best work, have much more of a preference of his later work, especially 'Dekalog' and his work after, but 'The Calm' is not deserving of the relative obscurity it has.

'The Calm' doesn't have an awful lot wrong with it, it's the sort of film that does almost everything correctly and with very good skill but it's also a case of Kieslowski's style and all his components (while present and correct here) became more refined later on. 'The Calm' does lack the intensity and emotional resonance of his later work, especially with the best 'Dekalog' stories, 'The Double Life of Veronique' and 'Three Colors: Red' and 'Blue'.

While the term "dated" is very rarely used by me (due to it often being overused and abused and often appearing on IMDb users' most hated words list) the film has suffered a little from being shelved for four years, the stylings, lifestyles, politics and attitudes may have appeared dated even in 1980 (feeling more mid-late-70s than early 80s) and while interesting to see one is reminded often as to how everything has changed and evolved over-time.

However, these nit-picks are not massive and much of 'The Calm' works very well. It is a good-looking film, as well as being beautifully shot with atmospheric use of colour to match the mood, it is gritty yet beautiful with many thoughtful and emotionally powerful images lingering long into the memory. Kieslowski's direction is quietly unobtrusive, intelligently paced and never too heavy. Very intriguing use of sound and silence, music is sparsely used but effectively intricate.

It's a thought-provoking film too, rarely rambling and makes what it has to say stick without being too heavy-handed, and while deliberately paced the story intrigues, engaging a good deal while also suitably challenging the viewer in spots. The themes are explored well, though there are thematically richer films from Kieslowski, and the characters (portrayed fairly bleakly but realistically) carry the story well. As ever, the complexity and nuances of the acting is to be admired.

Overall, interesting and very good early Kieslowski, though he did go on to better things later. 8/10 Bethany Cox

In 1980, Kieslowski was just emerging as filmmaker. I met him at a film festival at Bengaluru and I could have interviewed him as a film critic of a New Delhi daily. I ducked the opportunity, as I honestly considered Wajda and Zanussi to be way superior directors in Polish cinema at that point of time. What was missing in "The Calm' that was not so in later works of Kieslowski ("Dekalog," "Three Colors: Blue/White/Red," and "The Double life of Veronique")? The two collaborators who helped Kieslowski soar in those films are absent in this film: co-scriptwriter Piesiewicz and music composer Preisner.

In this film, instead of Preisner, Kieslowski's co-scriptwriter is actor Jerzy Stuhr who plays the lead role in the film. Kieslowski, who officially claimed to be an atheist, begins the movie with prisoners singing Christmas Carols in a prison cell. Nothing wrong here. Anton Grelak (Stuhr) who is supposed to be a "nice" guy caught in a bad political framework, "reforms" in the jail. He is soon fooling his prison mate on the train taking him home and is shown jumping off the train, avoiding his friend's cordial invitation. Grelak gives different versions of his real parents each time he is asked about them. Grelak gestures in a sexist way (to the camera) after meeting his future wife for the first time. His actions towards his lady householder are not honest. Kieslowski wants to present Grelak as a good guy with odds stacked against him, but any astute viewer will not buy that view easily.

The only stylistic element in the film--visions of wild horses--appear three times (anticipating his technique used in Dekalog and Red), once as a malfunctioning TV image and twice later when Grelak recalls those images when he is alone.

An unjustly imprisoned man is released after serving 3 years, in Communist Poland of the mid 1970s. He only wants peace, and the most normal life imaginable: work, a wife, kids, and a simple home of his own. But above all, peace.

As he is introduced into the Socialist society of the time, he soon discovers peace is not an easy goal; perhaps not even attainable in that society. The film shows outdated lifestyles, and scenes which would be considered kitsch by today's standards. The whole scenario showing us the conflicts to attain peace is totally outdated.

However, it is a little known, controversial (in its time) film by a great deceased director - reason enough to see it. And the conflicts faced to achieve peace are all completely different to those faced now, in the new order. Some are obsolete; such as the strict controls on one's movements in Communist times, the puritan ideals of sex and marriage, the machismo and submission to it by all women shown, the excessive vodka drinking (literally until you drop) and smoking anywhere and everywhere.

But, the conflict between balancing one's relationship with the boss on one side, and colleagues on the other, is still basically the same, whether it's in the communist system or in the capitalist system. Still, I think it's much easier now to avoid the conflicts and achieve some peace, as long as you lower your expectations.

That's why many viewers may not understand the film, or they understand but find it's a waste of time to see all this which they already know or lived through, rehashed once again. It's a Kiezlowski film, yes. But you won't find anything new, unknown or unrevealed about Kiezlowski in it. It's not for everybody who might think it's for them.