Movies: Katyn * * * *
(15A,IFI)
Friday June 19 2009
Iconic Polish director Andrzej Wajda fulfilled his life's work with this searing WWII drama that finally gets a release throughout Europe some two years after its release in his homeland.
The focus of the film is on the highly-charged and much-disputed massacre of some 20,000 Polish officers at the hands of the occupying Soviet army in the Katyn forests and its surroundings in 1940.
Throughout the war, and for decades afterwards, the Soviet Union tried to blame the massacre on the Wehrmacht who had invaded Poland from the West. It was only in 1990, at the height of glasnost, that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev finally admitted that the Red Army were the perpetrators.
Wajda's own father perished in the massacre, but he shows commendable restraint in his dramatisation of the events. The movie, instead, seethes with a quiet anger as it looks at the propaganda war that was waged between the two occupying forces, and how so many Poles felt they had little option but to collude in the deception and cover-up.
The narrative also telescopes on to a handful of characters — mainly the wives, mothers and daughters left behind, who are forced to live in an unbearable shroud of lies and uncertainty — to open out the story and show, quite effectively, how the Katyn massacre burnt an indelible mark on to the soul of the tragic Polish nation.
Wajda draws strong performances from his large, native cast, led by Andrzej Chyra and Maja Ostaszewska, and his evocation of the period through set design and lighting is beyond reproach.
Katyn will stir something profound in its home audience that cannot be fully understood by outsiders, but this remains a deadly serious and powerful piece of cinema, which was Oscar nominated for Best Foreign Language Film last year.
- Declan Cashin
