Katyn

Andrzej Wajda’s 1957 movie Kanal was a riveting, incendiary recreation of the final days of World War 2’s Warsaw uprising, and his French revolution movie Danton was about early 80s’ Eastern European tensions as much as beheaded bourgeoisie, so this is a director fascinated with the recent history of his homeland.

 Wajda and other crew members lost family at the Katyn massacre, so they are to be commended for resisting tub-thumping rantings about the Soviet forces’ sycophantic relationship with the Nazis in the early stages of WW2, before Hitler invaded Russia.

Katyn scored big at the Polish box office and re-ignited a political debate about the massacre, and received flak from the Russian rightwing press who maintain the mass slaughter was the work of marauding Nazis.

But, mainstream attempts at melodrama, sweeping crane shots and a Charlotte Gray gloss unbalance Wajda's desired mood, and a wartime sequence involving a thirty something mother whose husband and father are deported by the Soviet NKVD and the invading Nazis veers into cliche.

The post-war sequence, fragmenting into different episodes depicting a Polish major’s disgust at the lie he lives after escaping the massacre himself, a woman attempting to honour her brother’s death, and a young militant battling the Soviet occupiers make the point that victory did not bring happy endings to all nations.

What Katyn will be remembered for is the disturbing fifteen minute climactic flashback that unflinchingly recreates the massacre, detailing the clockwork processes that enabled so many soldiers to be killed.

This sequence has almost strayed in from another film, but is a shattering conclusion to a commendable movie.

Rob Daniel

Rob Daniel