On 5 March 1953, the heart of the great leader Joseph Stalin stopped beating. This sad fact plunged the entire Eastern Bloc into mourning for many days. Factories stopped, sirens wailed. Then, in every cultural centre, every school and every factory, assemblies and evening events were organised to honour the name of the deceased leader.
This was the case, among other places, in Lipsk, a small town on the Biebrza River in Podlaskie. There, several girls asked a young man preparing the hall what would happen during the ceremony. The man addressed replied jokingly that it concerned the division of Stalin’s estate. The young women, however, did not catch the joke. When the assembly was coming to an end, they publicly reminded everyone that the inheritance still had to be divided. The author of the unfortunate joke was arrested. In detention, he was threatened with serious consequences for his act. The man committed suicide, and his pregnant wife, shocked by her husband’s death, gave birth to a blind child. The event was described in a letter by the suicide’s distraught father. Years later, the text became part of the publication “Letters from the Polish People’s Republic”.
I remembered that book when I left the cinema after seeing Borys Lankosz’s “Revers”. Visually, the film brilliantly transports us to the beginning of the 1950s: black-and-white images edited together with newsreel footage, the clothes of the main characters, the interiors where they live and work, and the Palace of Culture. I had already seen all this earlier, including in the publication “Letters from the Polish People’s Republic”, which is full of reproductions of posters, stamps and photographs from that period. For me, however, the most important parallel is that both stories—the film and the one from the letter from Lipsk—show that history, written by the greatest figures of this world, affects in the cruellest way the people least responsible for it. We learn about the former in school lessons; unfortunately, we quickly and unjustly forget the latter.
It is 1952. The film’s main character, Sabina, is an inexperienced editor at a Warsaw publishing house. Although her family belongs to the pre-war intelligentsia (her mother, played by Krystyna Janda, had her pharmacy taken away, while her grandfather once owned a tenement building), they managed to obtain a comfortable flat thanks to her brother, a painter creating Socialist Realist canvases. The girl also seems to believe in the ideals of the new era. She does not want to hand over a one-dollar gold coin kept as a family treasure, and during the war she wanted to join the Warsaw Uprising, but together with her mother and brother she has adapted to socialist reality. The problem Sabina faces with her mother and grandmother (played by Anna Polony) is rather her impending status as a spinster. Her mother searches for a suitable husband for her at all costs. Sabina, however—a self-conscious, nondescript mouse with a volume of poetry in her hand—dreams more of a fairy-tale prince than of a respectable accountant. And that prince, named Bronisław (embodied by the handsome Marcin Dorociński), suddenly appears in her life. The road to a happy ending, however, begins to grow complicated. In reality, Bronisław resembles a prince only in appearance. He forces Sabina to make a decision that will shape her entire life. Without revealing the ending, I will write only that this seemingly simple story turns out to be anything but banal. And although it is a comedy—as it turns out, a black one—Sabina’s act is decidedly uncomic.
The film delights with outstanding acting—the three-generation trio of grandmother, mother and daughter can make you laugh to tears, and also somewhat recalls Almodóvar’s strong women. There are also excellent, often hilarious dialogues, situational and character comedy—as proof, almost any scene with Anna Polony and the superb sequence with a candidate for Sabina’s heart, the accountant (the brilliant Adam Woronowicz), who “despite having easy access to spirits, simply does not touch vodka”—a masterfully handled camera, skilful juggling of various film genres (film noir, thriller and comedy), and an excellent screenplay by Andrzej Bart, who showed us some truth about the Polish People’s Republic without unnecessary martyrology. Could Lankosz become the successor to Andrzej Munk, who, like no one else, knew how to portray the Second World War without bombast? Could Bart become the successor to Jerzy Stefan Stawiński, the screenwriter of “Bad Luck” and “Eroica”? Perhaps once again, as in the days of the Polish Film School, good writers will begin writing good screenplays for good directors.
What is particularly important to me is that “Revers” shows that one can speak about the Polish People’s Republic without having to set the story in prisons, important government offices or Soviet military units. Instead, one can listen to music and ordinary conversations, in which the words “Stalin” and “secret policeman” appeared less often than “husband” and “cheesecake”, and look into bathrooms, kitchens, cafés and offices. Life was happening there too, as was an alternative—but no less genuine—history of ordinary people who did not have to be secret policemen or opposition activists. People who, despite their ordinariness and attempts to survive in a distorted reality, sometimes had to look the terrible system straight in the eye. Those people were, after all, our parents and grandparents, who were first and foremost farmers, clerks, tailors, fathers and mothers, and only later heroes or antiheroes in the struggle for their homeland’s freedom.
Finally, one brief question: does Lankosz’s work have a chance at an Oscar? One would like to say yes. After all, quite recently another film—“The Lives of Others”—about a playwright persecuted by the Stasi received the statuette. The Polish entry may therefore fit the jury’s expectations with its subject matter. Nevertheless, unlike “Revers”, the story told in “The Lives...” contains somewhat fewer nuances, omissions and allusions to a little-known reality, which Hollywood cinema does not particularly favour. I do not think we need to worry about this, however—this time, a truly wonderful film was sent to Hollywood. Even if overlooked by the Academy, “Revers” deserves to be promoted everywhere possible.
Katarzyna Boćkowska