During
Poland’s Communist era, there was no quicker way to an industrial minister’s
heart than a spot of deforestation.
Slavishly ambitious Michal Toporny learns this lesson as he rises
through the bureaucratic ranks, jettisoning such trivialities as his family and
his soul along the way. Not exactly a
fable or a morality tale, Grzegorz Królikiewicz’s The Dancing Hawk (trailer here) is more like a visual barrage. It would not be the same film without Zbigniew
Rybczyński’s inventive work behind the camera, making it the perfect companion to
Gerald Kargl’s Angst during Shot by Rybczyński, the Spectacle
Theater’s two-film tribute to the future Oscar winner’s cinematography starting
this Thursday.
Hawk’s first twenty
minutes or so are like the best cinematic adaptation of James Joyce never
filmed. Toporny enters the cold, snowy world
during a time of war. He comes from
hardscrabble peasant stock, but evidently they were also minor property “holders,”
an inconvenient fact that requires Toporny to be more Communist than thou in
order to get ahead. He certainly has the
necessary moral flexibility, throwing one wife overboard in favor of his politically
connected classmate.
This
opportunistic pattern of behavior will repeat throughout Hawk. In fact, there are repetitive
loops throughout the film, intended to emphasize the Kafkaesque absurdity of
the bureaucracy, or perhaps just to make the Communist censors’ heads explode. Frankly, it is rather staggering this one
slipped past the state film authorities.
Like matter and anti-matter, it seems impossible for Hawk and Socialist Realism to coexist in
the same world.
Indeed,
as feverish and bizarrely expressionistic as Rybczyński’s cinematography undeniably
is, Królikiewicz’s critiques of the Socialist state remain impossible to
miss. Central state planning takes it in
the shins throughout the film, perhaps even harder than in Frank Beyer’s East
German classic Trace of Stones. The Communist Youth of Toporny’s college
years are also depicted as foaming-at-the-mouth bullies, who duly grow up to be
vicious, petty, in-fighting apparatchiks.
As
Toporny, Franciszek Trzeciak is surely small and banal, but he still finds a
sad clown pathos within the character, even performing a surreal variation on the
old Harpo Marx mirror gag. Toporny’s
eventual realization that he has spent his entire life serving a cold and
capricious master (much like the protagonist of Andrzej’s Wajda’s Without Anesthesia) is palpably heavy
stuff, even with all the madness swirling around him.
