Wałęsa: Man of Hope (Wajda, 2013): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.30pm
Guardian review:
At the age of 87, that remarkable Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda
has directed a movie with terrific gusto and a first-rate lead
performance from Robert Więckiewicz. It’s a full-tilt biopic tribute to
the trade-union leader Lech Wałęsa, founder of the Solidarity movement:
bullish, cantankerous, with an exasperating charm and the gift of the
gab. Wałęsa’s defiance of Poland’s Soviet masters removed the very first
brick from the Berlin Wall. Famously, Wałęsa was the one subversive
trade-union leader whom Margaret Thatcher felt able to love: Arthur
Scargill did not enjoy the same admiration. Wałęsa:
Man of Hope is a belated companion piece to his Man of Marble (1977)
and Man of Iron (1981), respectively about a Stakhanovite bricklayer and
his son in Poland; it discloses now an unexpected trilogy, and somehow
suggests, in retrospect, that the heroic “Man” of those first two films
really was Wałęsa all along. The almost Napoleonic career of Wałęsa
looked at the time like a kind of miracle; Wajda sets out to examine how
that miracle came about. Wałęsa starts as a shipyard
electrician, devoted to his young wife Danuta, (Agnieszka Grochowska),
and to their growing family, and radicalised by the Gdańsk shipyard riot
of 1970. Amusingly, Wajda suggests that Wałęsa’s luxuriant moustache
made him famous and recognisable: the anti-Stalin in the cause of
freedom. His activism moreover coincided with the sensational arrival of
the charismatic new Polish Pope John Paul II; the Catholic Wałęsa was a
key political beneficiary. It’s an invigorating and very enjoyable film
from a director who shows no sign of slowing down.
Peter Bradshaw
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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