Andrzej Wajda. "Katyn" and "Tatarak"

By David Hudson on 02/18/2009

[Updated through 2/21] Andrzej Wajda's "Katyn," which premiered at the Berlinale last year, opens today for a two-week run at New York's Film Forum. This year's Berlinale saw the premiere of Wajda's latest, "Tatarak" ("Sweet Rush," which I missed), and a roundup follows.

"Purportedly undertaken to 'proclaim' the details of the Katyn forest massacre (wherein the lives of over 20,000 Polish intelligentsia and upper echelon armed forces commanders, including the director's father, were systematically terminated by Soviet soldiers at Stalin's behest in 1940), ['Katyn'] trudges dazedly through the barbed no man's land between historical reenactment, familial drama, and gritted-teeth polemic," writes Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant.

"While never less than fascinating, 'Katyn' alternates between scenes of tremendous power and sequences most kindly described as dutiful," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "It's as if the artist is never certain whether he is making this movie for himself, his father, or the entire nation."

"At 82, [Wajda] has produced, in movies like 'Ashes and Diamonds' and 'Man of Marble,' an unparalleled cinematic record of Polish history, and 'Katyn,' nominated for an Academy Award last year, is a powerful corrective to decades of distortion and forgetting," writes AO Scott in the New York Times.

"Wajda does not tell this story from the perspective of the child he was, but there is something childlike about the movie's lack of context," writes David Edelstein in New York. "What I mean is: No one spells out why bad things are happening to bewildered people.... The arbitrary, brutal suppression of knowledge, of culture, of one's system of values, of one's very history: The theme - the vacuum - is central to so much of postwar Polish fiction and drama; it is central to even the Jewish perspective of Roman Polanski's 'The Pianist.'"

Earlier: A Berlinale 08 roundup.

"32 years after he cast her in 'Man of Marble,' Andrzej Wajda teams up again with Krystyna Janda in a film dedicated to the memory of Edward Klosinski, the cinematographer who shot 'Man of Marble' and went on to marry Janda," notes Dan Fainaru in Screen. "'Sweet Rush' plays like a celebration of death on three levels - as an adaptation of a short story by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, as a documentary about the shoot and as a poignant monologue by Janda in which she describes in details the last months of her husband, who died a year before the film was shot."

For Jay Weissberg, writing in Variety, the "complex, self-referential structure of Andrzej Wajda's long-gestating 'Sweet Rush' is worth pondering, but the emotional elements largely slip through the master's fingers," while for the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt, this is "a finely detailed, astutely crafted film in miniature, a small gemstone that glistens in the memory long after the lights come up."

Film-Zeit collects reviews in German.

As noted earlier, Wajda is already planning his next film. "What worries and makes me angry today is the situation where the hero of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, who played such an important role in history, is being attacked by people who are nobodies in comparison with him," he recently told Nick Holdsworth in Variety. Agnieszka Holland will write the screenplay.

Meanwhile, the series "Andrzej Wajda: Man of Cinema" is on at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago through the end of the month.

Updates: "Weighted by historical import and its attendant expectations, 'Katyn' is a monument of a movie: impressively made, suitably grave and lifeless," writes Eric Hynes at indieWIRE:

Lacking full characters or a workable dramatic thread, Wajda constructs a blocky, episodic soap opera, summoning melodramatics to stand in for drama and giving actors emotive face time to compensate for lack of characterization. All Polish soldiers appear decent, steely, and Catholic, while their women are uniformly loyal, consumed with the safety and whereabouts of their men, ever keeping oceans of tears in check. Characters vanish once their illustrative purpose has been achieved. Wajda can still orchestrate scenes with subtle mastery, moving the camera to triangulate subjects for varying effect, guiding naturalism to moments of vivid physicality, and sticking with an overt arrangement until it achieves poetry (such as a shot of officers imprisoned in a repurposed church, gathered around their bunks in the shape of a cross, the camera craning up to underline their divinity before descending back to humble earth). His visual language even bridges the heated theatrics with cool representational remove; yet he's ultimately failed by the story.

"Though it exposes long-obfuscated history, 'Katyn' barely distinguishes itself, despite Wajda's formal competence, from the myriad films chronicling other pogrom-era savageries." Henry Stewart in the L Magazine: "It's becoming more important not that we Never Forget these atrocities but that we never forget how to respond to them emotionally, which is increasingly difficult with each successive, repetitive and manipulative WWII heart-render."

Updates, 2/21: "Apart from the unavoidable quality of indifference that arises from the film's long stretches of cinematic time-marking, the strategy of situating a horrific historical event as some sort of narrative payoff - like a final shootout in an action picture - threatens to trivialize the deaths that the director set out to commemorate, reducing the slaughter of these innocents to the stuff of a crowd-pleasing grand finale," writes Andrew Schenker. "Fortunately, the set piece itself is a thing of wonder, nearly justifying its questionable narrative positioning: rousing without being exploitative, brilliantly orchestrated, but brutally matter-of-fact, it's something to satisfy the cineaste and the moralist alike."

"If it doesn't quite reach the standard of classic Wajda films like 'Man of Iron,' 'Danton' (out shortly on DVD) or 'A Love in Germany' - and may require footnotes for many non-Polish viewers - it's still a richly absorbing and intensely painful drama with a tremendous, mostly female cast," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon.

[Photos: "Katyn," Koch Lorber Films, 2007; "Tatarak," Akson Studio, 2009]

Tags: Andrzej Wajda, Berlinale 2009, Katyn, Polish Cinema, Sweet Rush