Kinoblog

I’d been meaning to watch The Revenge (Zemsta, 2002) for ages - it’s Andrzej Wajda’s last completed feature prior to this year’s Katyń - and after other plans fell through last night I gave it a go. It’s a mixed bag: on the one hand, it’s hugely entertaining seeing two great directors clearly letting their hair down and having a ball (Roman Polański being the other - he’s playing the lead role), and as a farcical costume romp it worked very well.

The basic situation, sourced from Alexander Fredro’s 1834 play (previously filmed by Antoni Bohdziewicz in 1956) is that two halves of the same crumbling castle are occupied by deadly rivals Cześnik Raptusiewicz (Janusz Gajos) and Rejent Milczeka (Andrzej Seweryn). As is often the way with costume farces, Cześnik’s niece Klara (Agata Buzek) and Rejent’s son Wacław (Rafał Królikowski) are madly in love with each other, but have to meet clandestinely to avoid enraging their elders - and Cześnik is similarly enamoured of the Widow Hanna (Katarzyna Figura). And when the Rejent finds out, he resolves to marry Wacław off to Hanna to upset everybody’s plans. Unfortunately, there’s a wild card in the form of Papkin (Polański), a dwarfish braggart who manages to create the impression that his influence and charisma are far greater than they actually are, and is consequently hired to carry out tasks that prove way beyond his abilities.

So far so genuinely amusing (Polański in particular seems to be having a whale of a time, as does an almost unrecognisable Daniel Olbrychski as Cześnik’s idiot manservant Dyndalski), but English-speaking viewers have a major stumbling-block with Vanguard Cinema’s DVD (R1 NTSC). There’s nothing wrong with the transfer (anamorphic picture, Dolby 5.1 surround), but the English subtitles only seem to translate for content rather than style - and while my ear for Polish is all but nonexistent, it was clear even to me that a lot of wordplay was simply being passed over. For starters, the dialogue is in verse, and while I appreciate that English verse translations pose a major challenge, it has been attempted in the past, most famously in the Anthony Burgess-sourced subtitles for Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Cyrano de Bergerac and also the Russian Cinema Council’s edition of Alexander Ptushko’s Pushkin-derived The Tale of Tsar Saltan. As it stands, though, the effect is not unlike watching a Shakespeare comedy with all the puns and poetry removed, thus depriving me of what Polish critics claim is a major part of the play’s appeal.

Janina Falkowska has written about the film in much more cultural and contextual detail for Kinokultura, and passages like this one:

The dialogue is delivered brilliantly by the exceptional cast carefully gathered by Wajda for the film, making the complex script dazzle with humor and wit; the words written almost two centuries ago by Alexander Fredro nonetheless stand out as a warning to present generations of Poles. Even the exquisite players of secondary roles, such as Daniel Olbrychski (Dyndalski), provide a veritable firecracker of verbal attacks and counterattacks filled with political and sexual innuendo.

…show the kind of thing that I missed.

Here’s a link to the BFI’s Polanski Gallery, with text by yours truly, assembled for an NFT retrospective back in 2005 or thereabouts. I’m hoping to write more about Polanski’s early work on Kinoblog, but this will have to do for now.

(and here are direct links to the pages on the early Polish shorts, and his debut feature Knife in the Water)

As part of my ongoing research into the extensive back catalogue of Andrzej Wajda, the grand old man of Polish cinema, I watched the Facets/Polart DVD of his 1960 film Innocent Sorcerers (Niewinni czarodzieje) last night.

It made for a fascinating contrast with his usual work. It was his fifth feature, but his first set in the (then) present, and the lack of period trappings makes for a much looser, more relaxed style - in fact, if I’d missed the director credit and had to guess, I’d have said it had far more in common with the work of Jerzy Skolimowski (who co-wrote the screenplay with Ashes and Diamonds author Jerzy Andrzejewski and plays a minor role, as the boxer whose career is threatened by an unwelcome medical diagnosis seconds before a key fight commences) or even Roman Polanski (who also appears).

Coincidentally, I’d rewatched Eric Rohmer’s My Night With Maud (Ma Nuit chez Maud) and Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love relatively recently, and all three films would make a great triple bill, as they all revolve around sensually-charged but nonetheless ultimately platonic relationships, prevented from further development by the various ideological hang-ups of one or other party.

In this case, the protagonist is Bazyli (or Basil in the subtitles), played by Tadeusz Łomnicki, a young doctor-cum-amateur jazz musician with a distinctly jaded attitude towards the fairer sex - or at least with the fact that he’s never found seduction particularly difficult. But when he meets Pelagia (Krystyna Stypułkowska), and is lured back to her flat for a series of oddly ritualised conversations and games (including a variant on strip poker performed with the aid of a matchbox, the film’s most famous set-piece), he becomes tantalised by the prospect of a relationship moving to a higher level - only to find that she disappears the next day, leaving him bewildered and, for possibly the first time in his life, emotionally self-aware.

Here’s a link to the relevant page in Wadja’s own website (in English), and a detailed review of the DVD by DVD Savant. Note that I had exactly the same technical problems with the disc that he describes - mainly, some of the worst juddering I’ve ever encountered on a PAL-to-NTSC conversion - even though I was watching the final commercial release. Unusually for a Facets release, though, the subtitles were fine - a few typos here and there and the odd bit of misformatting, but they were at least in sync, white and optional. As ever with this label, it’s swings and roundabouts.