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Friday, February 4, 2011
"The Promised Land" is a visual feast, fast-paced, and every
bit as ruthless as the cutthroat characters it depicts. The topic – the
Industrial Revolution, and the characters – immoral greedy monsters – are ugly
and mean, but Wajda's filmmaking is so virtuosic you watch just for the sheer
craft, splendor, and runaway train of a plot. I find it hard to sit through
movies where there are no sympathetic main characters and no possibility of a
happy ending, but "The Promised Land" is addictively watchable.
There's an orgy, a tiger, several mutilated bodies, fires, riots, history, and
Wojciech Kilar's driving, award-winning score.
Anyone interested
in the Industrial Revolution should see this movie. Fans of Dickens'
"Oliver Twist" and Gaskell's "North and South" really must
see it. I wish I could require my students to watch it. Wajda was determined to
get every detail correct. In the DVD's extra features, an assistant director
discusses a scene of indigent paupers receiving charity food. Wajda's team
discovered that the indigent were fed from long, metal tables with bowls built
right into them. They rebuilt such a table just for this scene, lasting a few
minutes. They had special wooden spoons made, and then weathered them by
soaking them in oil. The paupers' rags were similarly weathered. There is a lengthy
scene where Anna (Anna Nehrebecka), a country aristocrat, travels to the city. The
camera follows Anna and lays out Lodz before her in all its gritty, noxious
detail: smoking chimneys, workers' funerals, fighting men, the Jewish quarter.
The scene looks like documentary footage of a late nineteenth-century
industrial city.
"The Promised Land" also
takes the viewer into the mansions of Lodz, almost ridiculous in their
sumptuousness, plunked down in so much filth, squalor, and despair. Ornate
winding staircases, gilt-encrusted columns and ceiling murals lure on
industrialists willing to wring every last penny from their desperate employees.
"The Promised Land" depicts Lodz's emergence
as a textile manufacturing hub. Three friends, one a Polish aristocrat, one a Jew,
and one a German, strive to build their own factory. They have few resources
and must do dirty things to make their dreams of unlimited wealth a reality. Blond
Karol (Daniel Olbrychski) has the face of a cherub and the soul of a serial
killer. His entire being is omnivorous greed. Moryc (Wojciech Pszoniak) cheats
another Jew to get his stake. After doing so, he practically collapses from the
strain, and then breaks the fourth wall, winking at the audience. He's just an
actor playing a part, he reminds us, as they all are, playing any part they
want to get their highest ideal: cash.
The film also
depicts workers and their plight. A dewy young mill hand is lured into
prostitution. Others are consumed by the machines they work. Scenes of mutilated
flesh are quite graphic, and yet not sensationalistic. This is the price poor people
pay for bread, the film shows us. The camera does not linger. It keeps moving. Just
like Lodz, just like men chasing cash, just like history.
There are a few characters who aren't utterly despicable. They appear,
make small squeaks of decency, self-respect, and dignity, and are crushed by
the inevitable. There is a stunning scene that is quite different from anything
else in the film. The film moves quickly and purposefully, but in this scene
men meet in a small room to play classical music. The scene is not at all
essential to the plot. It moves with atypical languor. The scene seems to say,
"Yes, people in Lodz had souls." That reminder makes the surrounding
greed-induced frenzy all the more disturbing.
Some
viewers protest "The Promised Land" as an anti-Semitic film, because of
unpleasant Jewish characters. Indeed, there are unpleasant Jewish characters in
the film. Virtually *every* character in the film is unpleasant – even the
pretty, innocent child lured into prostitution. The film does not allow you to
pity her, but implies that she was complicit in her own downfall. Further,
every character is unpleasant in an ethnically- gender-, and socioeconomic-class-coded
way. That is, the Polish peasants are unpleasant in a stereotypical way associated
with peasants, the one priest is unpleasant in a way associated with priests. The
men are bad men, the women are bad women. The priest is onscreen for minutes
only, but he leers at a pretty factory hand. Anna has a big heart, but she is
ineffectual and not smart enough to see through Karol. Other women are whores
or idiots. The Polish aristocrat aggressively sells out every high ideal his
ancestors held dear. He desecrates an image of Poland's icon, the Black Madonna
of Czestochowa. The Germans are either sadistic and autocratic or lumpen and
dull. The Polish peasant who manages to rise above his station is an
insufferable, loud-mouthed boor. This film isn't anti-Semitic; it is brutally misanthropic.
It depicts people at their worst.
Again, it is Wajda's
virtuosic filmmaking that makes all this endurable. At a key moment, a rock
flies through a window. That rock means much – the inevitable march of history
that has brought industrialists high and might also bring them very, very low.
Any other filmmaker would probably have handled the rock through a window as a
crashing sound followed by a thud. Wajda films this scene with such skill and
poetry that the rock becomes a character in the film. It demands, and gets, the
viewer's full attention. Subsequent action is filmed *from the rock's point of
view.* Poland is a small, distant, and much contested country. It's filmmaking
like that that amply earned Wajda his honorary Academy Award.
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