• Ashes and Diamonds

8/24/21 (Tues)

Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 film is apparently the third in an unplanned trilogy about wartime Poland. The story takes place over the course of the day of victory over Germany, but no one is celebrating amid the uncertainty over the country’s future as it simply moves into the hands of the Soviets. Maciek is a young resistance fighter who’s still resisting, more out of habit than closely held belief. He’s ordered to kill a Communist leader, a task he seems blankly to accept. He lolls around lazily on the grass waiting for his prey, then casually kills the approaching persons only to discover that he’s murdered two innocent men who happened upon the scene. This sets off a Hamlet-like crisis of confidence regarding the endless cycle of violence for questionable goals. His turmoil is exacerbated when he falls in love with a young barmaid, making him question his entire values. In addition, the target of his plot, though a Communist official, has returned from fighting in Spain and is not unsympathetic himself (maybe inevitably, given that the film was made under Communist rule). In the end, he feels bound to his lost cause and kills the official, who falls into his arms in a symbiotic moment of two characters caught in their own unforgiving philosophies. Maciek escapes but is hunted down and shot, and our last image is him dying in fetal position on a garbage heap in a huge field.

Maciek’s crisis is very much that of Poland, which, in going seamlessly from one dictatorial regime to another, must have wondered what all the fighting and dying was about. That question is even more intense being on an individual level. It’s impressive that the director was able to get away with this in Communist Poland. Maciek is clearly seen as the hero here despite his anti-Communist stance (or at least those of his boss), though it may have helped that he dies in the end. The Communist official says, “The end of the War isn’t the end of our fight. The fight for Poland and what kind of country it is to become has just begun.” That sounds nice, but giving one’s life for that puts it on a different level. Is it better to die heroically for a vague ideal or live quietly in a despotic social structure? The promise of love obviously gave the young film a different and deeper perspective. There’s a subplot involving an ambitious guy who, less tied to any ideals other than his own material comfort, switches effortlessly from aiding the assassins to the promise of a promotion under the new regime. Unfortunately he gets drunk in premature celebration only to be cast aside due to his own inebriated behavior, leaving him nowhere. The banquet at which he ruins his future itself shows the elevated existence of the new rulers, who have no intention of living the kind of lives to which they’re dooming their fellow countrymen.

The movie’s title relates to a poem that features in the film: “So often are you as a blazing torch…you know not if the flames bring freedom or death, consuming all that you most cherish. Will only ashes remain, and chaos whirling into the void, or will the ashes hold the glory of a starlike diamond…of everlasting triumph?” (An even better translation that I found online: “Will only ash and chaos be left in the end that follow a storm into the abyss / Or may a diamond be found in the ash, a dawn of an everlasting victory?”) There was also a nice line regarding a mixture of German and English bullets: “At close range, there’s not the slightest difference.” The music in the film is adeptly chosen, from the song sung at the party (“And all the poppies of Monte Cassino / Will be redder from growing in Polish blood”) to the polonaise that the revelers dance to in an unthinking nod to an indefinable entity that they know as Poland.

The evasive Zbigniew Cybulski clearly models the rebel-without-a-cause character on James Dean, including a decidedly anachronistic 1950s outfit, and appears to have been associated with that image ever since. (The actor even died a young Dean-style death in a transport-related accident.) His ever-present sunglasses felt a bit much, though they’re written into the script as a result of his fighting in the tunnels during the Warsaw Uprising (he calls them dryly “a souvenir of unrequited love for my homeland”). He had some Dean-like mannerisms as well. I wasn’t as taken by his performance as most seem to be, but he certainly stood out, for better or worse. The acting in general was variable by modern standards. The standout was Ewa Krzyzewska, whose fatalistic and rather sad portrayal as the barmaid couldn’t have been bettered.

The film feels a bit old in its acting, overt symbolism (e.g. the upside-down cross in the church), overdone farce (e.g. fire extinguisher scene), and implausible coincidences (e.g. man overhearing hysterical woman in opposite hotel room who happens to be the wife of the guy he mistakenly shot). Those make the film a chore at times. I wish the director had cut some of the loose strands, like the kid who gets drunk at the party, which would have tightened the plot. Still, a worthwhile film, not only a sharp portrait of the times but a thoughtful visualization of interesting philosophical themes. I could imagine a Japanese version set in the late shogunate or early Meiji period.