Katyn
Director: Andrzej Wajda
With Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book and, most recently, Jiri Menzel’s I Served the King of England, the present decade has been kind to veteran European directors staging comebacks via large-scale, often autobiographical projects dealing with the Second World War. On paper Katyn, directed by Poland’s most revered film-maker, octogenarian Andrzej Wajda, and nominated for the Foreign-Language Oscar, looks like the latest example of this mini-trend.
Reportedly one of the most expensive Polish productions ever mounted, it addresses the still-controversial Katyn massacre of March 1940, when 5,000 Polish officers were executed in a forested area near Smolensk by Soviet forces (another 17,000 were killed elsewhere on the same day as part of the same operation, bringing the toll to around 22,000.) The Soviets initially tried to blame the Nazis for the killing and arguments over responsibility continue to rumble on. Wajda, whose father was among the victims, adapted (with Przemyslaw Nowakowski) Andrzej Mularczyk’s well-regarded book, Post Mortem, bringing it to the screen with the help of high-calibre collaborators such as cinematographer Pawel Edelman (Oscar-nominated for The Pianist) and composer Krzystof Penderecki.
The resulting film is as professional and sober as one would expect, its focus alternating between a handful of Katyn victims and their loved-ones back home, the time-frame moving back and forward between 1939 and the immediate post-war period until, finally, we witness the slaughter itself.
This sequence is an aptly bleak and chilling depiction of the mechanics of murder, a stream of men dispatched with a single bullet to the head and pitched into one of many mass graves. The impact is such that this sequence almost counterbalances the deficiencies of what’s gone before.
Whereas Polanski, Verhoeven and Menzel executed their war-epics with an engaging freshness, Wajda’s approach is stiff and starchy. His film is a “prestige” drama weighed down by its own scale and reverence. There are effective little touches here and there, but otherwise Katyn is like a dauntingly heavy kind of painting.
It may passably function as a necessary history lesson for current and future generations, but in 2009 seems distractingly dated as a drama – and not just because of the dubbing applied to certain characters’ dialogue. Katyn is a solid, impeccably well-intentioned work, opulently accurate in its attention to period details. However, this particular story deserves more.
Neil Young
