Whenever I see a film by Andrzej Wajda, I sometimes feel I have stepped into a time warp. I am back at the Cannes Film Festival in the mid-Fifties, waiting and wondering...Will the new film from the Soviet bloc countries arrive in time? Or will it be stopped on Moscow's orders at the frontier, before it can hit the 'free screens' of the West?
To appreciate Ashes And Diamonds, you need to put yourself into an era of political censorship and oppression that today's generation has never known - when a film made by a dissident, smuggled out of the country, could tell us more about the mood back home than umpteen foreign ministers' speeches.
The action in Ashes And Diamonds, which Wajda made in 1958, covers only 12 hours in a small Polish town where the end of the war has just been announced. But a young Resistance fighter, loyal to the Polish government-in-exile in London, has still got orders to kill. His target: the newly arrived Communist district secretary, an old soldier from the Spanish Civil War, not a Soviet mouthpiece. Wajda builds tension as the young man stalks his victim. Fate and doom fill the air. The assassin is compelled to consult his conscience as he begins to understand that he has been left stranded between the lost cause of the past and the betrayal of the future. The film's humanity lies in the sorrows of historical inevitability: a very Polish sentiment, not far from self-pity, but distanced from it by the performance of Zbigniew Cybulski.
This name probably doesn't mean much to youngsters today, more's the pity. Cybulski accidentally stepped off a station platform in 1967 and ended his brilliant career under the train wheels. During his short life he had much in common with the generational hero he most resembled, in looks and attitude - namely, James Dean. Both were loners who nursed a romantic hurt. They provided contemporary teenagers with an iconic outlet for their own frustrations. Cybulski's trademark was the dark spectacles he wore on and off screen: a mask for some inward loneliness, perhaps, though also interpreted as a memento of the darkness of the Warsaw sewers and the mole-like Resistance there that he had personified so brilliantly in Kanal - Wajda's first electrifying and greatest film. With his blue jeans, zip-jacket and brush haircut, his 'Western' looks were the one way left for students after the Soviet Union's second oppression of Eastern block countries in 1956 to make their dissident views visible, if not audible, on the streets. Without needing words, Cybulski projected eloquently the bitterness of his generation.
Something, I think, died in Wajda, too, along with Cybulski's death. When you watch Ashes And Diamonds, remember, you're not just seeing a film: you're looking at a manifesto that has found a voice and a face and speaks for a whole deceived generation. The French Institute's Cine Lumiere is showing the film in Polish, with English subtitles.
Ashes To Diamonds
Cert: 15
