Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen GUILT TRIP MEN WITHOUT A COUNTRY ON DECEMBER 8, 1981, a carpenter named Eugeniusz Haczkiewicz arrived in London with a tour group from his native Poland. Shortly thereafter, director Jerzy...
...Nowak, the worker played by Irons, is in charge of the construction crew because he's the only one who speaks English...
...I stopped working on the script I was writing and went around for a fortnight in a complete daze," he has said...
...The bad position, he's in exacerbates the vaguely menacing quality of life in England...
...Since none can either read the newspapers or understand the television, Nowak easily hides from them what's happened in Poland...
...He got English actor Jeremy Irons to agree to star, which was quite a coup because Irons is much in demand these days...
...He reacts violently, smashing the picture tube, blowing out the set...
...Skolimowski was also galvanized into action on his script, which he now adapted to the events he was witnessing...
...There is a certain testiness that permeates everyday life in England...
...Then they resume their saunter to the other side...
...Those conflicts are what come out in Moonlighting...
...COUN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Through Nowak, Skolimowski is acting out his own guilt about having deserted his native land for the more comfortable life in the West...
...Another member of the group is Roman Polanski, on whose first important feature...
...They are slapstick characters without dimension...
...It implies a concern for Poland that no one in the movie has shown, including Skolimowski...
...No," he answers nervously...
...Nowak tells us he fears their finding out about developments at home...
...Is this just because they resent his having concealed the truth from them...
...Each is about as affecting as a paperhanger in a Laurel and Hardy movie...
...and on it one night, his snapshot of his Polish girlfriend begins to move like a video hallucination...
...Haczkiewicz he took into his own house...
...Haczkiewicz was the catalyst...
...The house that the workers renovate is in reality Skolimowski's house...
...It was Haczkiewicz, who said that he and the others were stranded in London, and nearly broke, because of what had happened at home since their departure...
...In the course of exercizing his own resentments thus...
...Skolimowski at once found everyone in the group somewhere to stay...
...Considering the inspiration for Moonlighting, and the urgency with which it was made, it's extraordinary how little the crisis in Poland impinges on the film...
...He belongs to a group of directors who received their education in the state-run film schools of Eastern Europe, and then defected to the West...
...They don't even seem to notice when their weekly phone call from home quits coming through...
...The pettiness of life in England is...
...As he disappears from view, some alley cats crossing in the foreground turn on each other and snarl viciously for a few seconds...
...In the absence of other credible characters, Moonlighting becomes a film about Nowak alone...
...Knife in the Water, Skolimowski collaborated as scriptwriter...
...The voice-over narration that Skolimowski creates for him indicates the subjectivity of the experience we are watching...
...And he got his film into production...
...But the momentous events there are not what shape his actions in the film...
...One of the humiliations Nowak suffers is buying a used television whose picture tube goes out the first time he watches it...
...Amidst all this hostility, the poor chap doesn't know whether he's coming or going...
...Having failed as a window on the outside world, the set becomes a mirror reflecting Nowak's soul...
...At best this ending is confusing...
...One grabs a live electrical connection...
...Just his presence in England testifies to the fact, for the covert privilege his work there serves is the sort of thing Solidarity wants to end...
...It became a story of four Polish workers who have been sent to London to do an illegal renovation of a house owned by a Party boss, and who are trapped there when martial law is declared back in Poland...
...Since Nowak is the sole worker who speaks English, the others played by Haczkiewicz and two Polish ex-patriots never come to life...
...Skolimowski seems to forget about Haczkiewicz, with whom the film is supposed to have begun...
...That film made them both internationally prominent...
...Skolimowski had been deeply depressed ever since the declaration of martial law in Poland and the suppression of the Solidarity movement...
...Other touches have the same' purpose...
...They are too preoccupied with England...
...He has to scrounge and eventually steal in order to keep the construction project going...
...It was the obvious location for a movie concentrating on home truths...
...Skolimowski wrote his script...
...At worst, it seems fraudulent...
...Nowak's interior monologue continues voice-over, and in it he frets a lot about Poland...
...Another takes a bath with his hat on...
...It's a moment of sheer paranoia...
...Until this moment we have had no hint that they are even capable of such an emotion...
...As he clears passport control upon entering Britain at the beginning of the film, one of the customs officers asks him whether he's a member of Solidarity...
...They only mumble occasionally in their native language, which no sub-titles translate, so that we have little sense of what they think or feel...
...Shortly thereafter, director Jerzy Skolimowski, who has lived in London for years, was walking down the street and overheard some people speaking Polish...
...It's as if everyone expects something unpleasant to happen...
...He did all this, moreover, in a record eighteen days...
...The very success that such moments achieve weakens the film...
...His predicament gives Skolimowski a way to dramatize the nastiness...
...Depicting it is the one area in which the film succeeds, sometimes brilliantly...
...The third leaves his varnish can in the middle of the floor he has just brushed...
...He even managed to persuade the Home Office to change Haczkiewicz's tourist visa to another type that would allow him to play the role of a Polish worker in the film...
...They are the source of the film's sensitivity to inner torment...
...Nowak is trying to do a complicated technical job in this atmosphere, and do it on the sly...
...Hungry for contact with his fellow countrymen - perhaps for some feeling of solidarity of his own - Skolimowski went up to the group he heard speaking Polish and engaged one of them in conversation...
...and in an aside to us, he adds that that's the only true statement he's made to them...
...The best scene in the film is a trivial one where Nowak rides his stolen bicycle down a street...
...They reflect only the experience of the person for whom these English irritations have become the whole way of life...
...He stares at his own image in the darkened screen...
...But the paranoia is not finally Nowak's so much as Skolimowski's...
...Shopkeepers and trades people give the feeling that they find it distasteful to have to deal with strangers...
...After they've left the frame, Nowak re-appears pedaling in the opposite direction...
...Having intended to make a film about the plight of some former countrymen at this historic moment, Skolimowski has made one about himself instead...
...They're too excited about buying watches and other capitalist goods with the profits from their job...
...Or are we supposed to believe that they are irrationally taking out on him their patriotic rage...
...I was able to get from him, first hand," Skolimowski later explained, "exactly what I needed to convey the reality of the situation in the screenplay...
...When he does finally have to tell them because it's time to return, they begin savagely beating him...
...Having left the society that gave him such an opportunity, Skolimowski must feel terribly torn when he has to stand by and watch the sort of national agony that Solidarity and its suppression represent...
Vol. 109 • November 1982 • No. 19
