Ashes and Diamonds review – Poland faces grim postwar realities in Andrzej Wajda’s 1958 masterpiece | film

TThe title of Andrzej Wojda’s 1958 film is taken from a verse by Polish Romantic poet Cyprian Norwid: “Will there remain among the ashes a star-like diamond, the dawn of eternal victory?” They are words imbued with dark sarcasm and disillusionment. A pair of lovers in this film discover it written in a ruined church and find it difficult to decipher, as they are unable to determine their loyalty and future as World War II comes to its chaotic end. Would the diamonds of future law-abiding peacetime prosperity under communist rule – effective rule by those who began the war of conquest of Poland in alliance with the Nazis – be better than the ashes of wartime suffering that at least provided certainty and purpose?

The scene is a provincial Polish town on Victory Day, May 8, 1945. Across the continent, there are complex and unresolved feelings under all the celebrations, particularly in Poland, the historic center of the European war. Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski), Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) and Drewnowski (Bogumił Kobiela) are three fighters in the local army resistance movement, who are as patriotically opposed to the Communists as they are to the Nazis. They consider their mission to have by no means ceased with the end of the war, but they have just gone bizarrely wrong in their final mission of assassinating Communist Party member Szczewka (Wacsław Zastrzyśński); While lounging and sunbathing before the strike, they accidentally kill two innocent young men.

Nauseated by his failure, horrified at the sight of the grief of a young woman mistakenly engaged to one of his innocent victims, and realizing that he is exhausted by the end of the war, Masek is nevertheless ordered by his superiors to try again. He must kill Szczuka, who is scheduled to attend a victory banquet and stay overnight at the seedy state-run Hotel Monopol, the name of which is a twist on a black comedy in itself. Maciek was given a room adjacent to the one occupied by Szczuka, who would learn that his teenage son was working for the rebels. Maciek flirts with waitress Krystyna (Ewa Krzyżewska) and lures her to his room, which is now more important as a site for love-making than a base for political murder. He is struck by a terrible epiphany: he loves Christina, or at any rate he knows he is now a lover, not a fighter. The war is over. If he refused this mission, it didn’t mean he was a coward or a traitor… right? Why did he want to kill this guy anyway? Or anyone? Why was all this? “I can’t kill or hide anymore!” He laments his unmoved commander.

Meanwhile, the banquet continues and turns into a drunken orgy. Drewnowski becomes horribly drunk while seeking a job in journalism under the new dispensation; Scenes showing squares of newsprint used as toilet paper give a clear indication of how noble this is. Wandering the streets, Masek and Cristina encounter a ruined church where the crucified Christ is now swinging madly upside down, encounter Norwid’s poem and make a terrible discovery about who else is there.

Cristina asks why Masek wears dark glasses. “A souvenir of unrequited love for country,” Macek replies. The sunglasses make him look constantly disguised, incognito, unable to show his loyalty. He will eventually take them off, but there is no corresponding release or announcement. Everywhere in this film there is sadness and a kind of delirium: the film was made only 13 years after the events it describes; The original novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski on which it was based only lasted three years. It is a testament to the crisis of identity and ideology in Poland.