WALESA: A MAN OF HOPE : A MISNOMER DOCUMENTARY
BY PRADIP BISWAS, THE Indian EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS, India JURY MEMBER OF INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India AND FRIGOURG INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, SWISS
44TH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL OF India, GOA, 2013
At the age of 87, that remarkable Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda has directed a documentary with false gusto called WALESA : A MAN OF HOPE. It is of 87 minute duration. The lead performance is done by Robert Wieckiewicz. It is said it's a biopic tribute to the trade-union leader Lech Wałesa, founder of the Solidarity movement: bullish, cantankerous, and finally wrong doer as his movement could not bring the golden age for the Socialist countries that he in association with CIA lobby uprooted. This is such a truth many would hate to be convinced. But it is true, very true and true again. Wałesa's defiance of Poland's Soviet masters removed the very first brick from the Berlin Wall. Famously, Wałesa was the one subversive trade-union leader whom Margaret Thatcher felt able to love: Arthur Scargill did not enjoy the same admiration. So is Lindsay Anderson, the angry unbritish British director, founder of FREE CINEMA
Wałesa: Man of Hope is a belated companion piece to his Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981) respectively. It discloses now an unexpected trilogy, and somehow hints it. In retrospect, that the heroic "Man" of those first two films really was Wałesa all along, so said Peter Bradshaw, the right-winger critic of THE GUARDIAN. It starts as a shipyard electrician, devoted to his young wife Danuta, (Agnieszka Grochowska), and to their growing family, and radicalised by the Gdansk shipyard riot of 1970. Amusingly, Wajda, armed with his skewed perception. idolizes Wałesa's luxuriant moustache that made him famous and recognizable: 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 Wałesa was a key political beneficiary. It's an invigorating and very enjoyable film from a director who shows no sign of slowing down.
Winner of Nobel Peace Prize, Walesa in fact brought down socialism with a hope that his new State would bring golden age to those betrayed by the corrupt socialist regimes. Good. Good to that extent that hold some iota of substance. But after that??? The regime that he brought about for the betrayed people of Poland just failed to deliver goods as the hope of the big Capitalist Nations poured not an inch of financial succour to the hard-hit Poland. The common people who used to get free ration, food, milk and education are all gone for a burton, for ever. The current Poland is neither Socialist country nor a proud Capitalist country. It is in economic shamble.
What the great Wajda has done is to show the false side of the coin. We cannot accept such
