"Precz z zaplesniala elita wladzy!"
"Do away with the moldy old governing elite!"
Mass protests always seem to be about such basic things, e.g. stop killing us, or give us enough money so that we can feed ourselves, and here under Soviet communism it was the same. The context of Wajda's film is extraordinary, as it was made in 1981 during the heart of the Solidarity movement, and wove a fictional sequel to his 'Man of Marble' amidst the real-life story of the Gdansk shipyard workers practically while it was taking place. In the documentary 'Wajda by Wajda,' he explained the genesis of the film thusly: "I entered the shipyard in August 1980, going from the gate to the room where the workers were deliberating. I was led by one of the shipyard workers with a white and red armband. He showed me into the room and said: 'Mr. Andrzej, make a movie about us!'"
The film shows the usual management responses to worker organization - the playbook never seems to change, just the characters/country/time in history - and it includes police brutality, corruption of the union bosses, propaganda (here leaflets dropped from an airplane instead of posted on the internet), provocation as a way of inciting violence and to put pressure on the unity of the group, and infiltration. It's amazing that a brief window in the evolution of the government allowed all of this to be shown, another in a string of remarkable successes for Wajda over his career in this regard.
Unfortunately, I think the storytelling doesn't quite live up to the historical moment, and at 153 minutes, the film is too long. It was probably a mistake to first center it on the infiltrator, a man torn between both sides and whose desperate need for vodka seems to underscore how lost he is (at one point he breaks a bottle in the bathroom, and using a towel, soaks it up, wrings it out, and carefully avoiding broken glass, drinks it...ugh). We don't see Krystyna Janda's character until the 98 minute point, and even then it seemed a narrative mistake, as for the next 20-30 minutes we get a long flashback that for me was defocusing, including footage of her wedding, even if that did allow Lech Walesa to appear in another way. I think Wajda got a little bogged down in trying to tell the ending to 'Man of Marble' the way he had wanted to, though I suppose in taking pains to do this, he illustrated the handing off a struggle from one generation to the next.
Where the film shines is in showing us these real moments of progress in Poland, and it has a place in Polish history for doing so. As the father (Birkut from the first film, now a shipyard worker) debates with son (a student, also played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz), his simple line "No lie can last forever" is incredibly moving. Later one of their elderly mothers says "We are going to win. If not now, then next time," indicating dogged optimism and the need for sustained protest, over years and generations. When we see the real-life footage of interviews of striking workers and they talk about cost of living and one says "They know that today workers aren't ignoramuses from the 18th century," it comes from a place of intelligence and courage. And lastly when we see the great Lech Walesa and his fellow members of the strike committee, it's powerful, powerful stuff. It gave me goosebumps when we first see him walking through a crowd, set to the acoustic guitar of Maciej Pietrzyk's "Piosenka dla córki" (Song for daughter). The ending, with Walesa being carried on the shoulders of protesters in the real-life story and the son honoring his father's makeshift grave in the fictional one, is very strong. Whatever his faults, Wajda again bore witness, and to have made the film in 1981 I think he was deserving of the awards he received.
