I had read about the crimes the Soviets perpetrated against the Poles after World War II. But Andrzej Wajda's movie Katyn opened my eyes to a new range of crimes committed during the war. After Germany's invasion and the Polish army's numerous defeats against a stronger and better organized enemy, the Soviet Union invades Poland too and takes custody of all the Polish officers captured by the Germans. They have a simple intention: wiping them out in. This would not only make the Polish soldiers more receptive to the Russian army but also allowed them to eliminate a good deal of the Polish intelligentsia, since many reserve officers included doctors, artists, lawyers, architects. In one single strike the Russians managed to destroy the future of Poland to make it easier to indoctrinate the survivors with the spirit of their totalitarian ideology.
On paper this sounds like a great premise for a war movie, but Wajda fails to deliver a good movie. The narrative lacks cohesion and many scenes lack soul or innovation. I say this in disappointment because I wanted to have enjoyed this movie more.
The massacre scenes, which the director cleverly left for the end of the movie, after going through all the drama it caused the victims' families, stood out more than anything for their brutality. He shot death in a way alien to normal cinema, which tends to glorify violence. Instead he showed scared men being killed in an efficient, methodical, clinical manner, one after another.
I also liked that this movie emphasised more the reactions of the families than the final days of the victims. We follow several stories showing the hopes of the wives and mothers of the soldiers for their safe return, their inability to cope with loss, and the resentment some feel in Post-War Poland about the way Katyn was excised from public conscience by the Russian army and the futility of trying to stir revolt in the minds of those who welcome the new communist order.
Although I applaud the existence of movies like Katyn, I wish Wadja had succeeded in making a good movie as much as he did in teaching an important history lesson. Apart from Pawel Edelman's cinematography, whose work I've admired since Polanki's The Pianist, I found every aspect of Katyn too ordinary for a director of Andrzej Wajda's stature.
On paper this sounds like a great premise for a war movie, but Wajda fails to deliver a good movie. The narrative lacks cohesion and many scenes lack soul or innovation. I say this in disappointment because I wanted to have enjoyed this movie more.
The massacre scenes, which the director cleverly left for the end of the movie, after going through all the drama it caused the victims' families, stood out more than anything for their brutality. He shot death in a way alien to normal cinema, which tends to glorify violence. Instead he showed scared men being killed in an efficient, methodical, clinical manner, one after another.
I also liked that this movie emphasised more the reactions of the families than the final days of the victims. We follow several stories showing the hopes of the wives and mothers of the soldiers for their safe return, their inability to cope with loss, and the resentment some feel in Post-War Poland about the way Katyn was excised from public conscience by the Russian army and the futility of trying to stir revolt in the minds of those who welcome the new communist order.
Although I applaud the existence of movies like Katyn, I wish Wadja had succeeded in making a good movie as much as he did in teaching an important history lesson. Apart from Pawel Edelman's cinematography, whose work I've admired since Polanki's The Pianist, I found every aspect of Katyn too ordinary for a director of Andrzej Wajda's stature.