Operation Hyacinth

At the first sigh, a film about Polish pink files under Comunist regime. In essence, just an inspired portrait of a dictatorship. Admirable work of Tomasz Zietek, precise and sublle exploration of a dark universe, good game of apparences, mix of justice spirit and love .

A well crafted film about idealism and truth, proposing not exactly, not only, a requisitorium against homophobia but a beautiful work about live in truth.

This is a really tight fact-based drama based on a true chapter from the ignominious past of communist Poland. Beautifully photographed and set in a bleak Warsaw winter. Good performances all around and a compelling narrative make this stand above gay persecution tropes that often accompany similarly themed motion pictures.

Glad to be just a newborn during that period of time (1985-1987) from what I saw on this movie.

It is successful in painting bleak and grimy days of communist Poland and it is respectful to every party involved, even the police/militia lol.

Good job to everyone involved. IMO this is better than other similarly themed Netflix original movies: Dance of 41, Dear Ex and I Am Jonas.

!980's Poland. The cracks in the repressive system are showing everywhere. This is a time when Solidarity, the trade union becomes a force to reckon with. The era of ideals has long gone, nobody believes in the Communist "paradise", least of all communists themselves. All that's left is naked repression. And they certainly knew how to repress. Among many other monstrous ideas was to make list of known homosexuals and force them into collaboration. "Operation Hyacinth" is an impeccably done film-noir. The set-up might be quite familiar, lone wolf policeman fighting for justice, but this drab, gray world of the Iron Curtain Poland is starting to shift and change giving a glimpse of things to come. Long path from Communism to ultra-catholic right-wing nationalism might seem like a colossal waste of time, but the bare fact of this movie being made, shows that better things are coming. The old repression didn't win in the end, the new one will fail too. Sooner or later.

Summary

What appeared to be a Polish version of Cruising at the beginning is definitely not. It is a successful neo noir, controversial due to its subject matter for a Polish fiction, which recounts a police investigation into a period during which thousands of homosexuals and heterosexuals related to them were persecuted, mistreated, booked and sometimes compulsively detained. This is another of those films that strongly recreates that oppressive period climate, but also everyday "behind the iron curtain".

Review:

During the 1980s, while the Polish police and secret service carried out Operation or Action Jacinto, the young detective Robert (Tomasz Zietek, with an air of Polish Alain Delon) faces the investigation, as an undercover agent, of a murder in the underground gay community in Warsaw. Despite the rapid "solving" of the case under pressure from the SB (Polish intelligence and secret police, in which his own father is a colonel), Robert insists on carrying out the investigation and will do so for more than one reason.

What appeared to be a Polish version of Cruising at the beginning, is definitely not. Piotr Domalewski's film is a neo noir in which Robert's research poses challenges to the system that are later enhanced by more personal ones that are added. It is controversial for a Polish fiction to relate a police investigation referring to a period during which thousands of homosexuals were registered in a compulsive way from raids in a framework of denunciation so expensive to Stalinism and police brutality and that gave rise to all kinds of extortion. In other words, Operation Jacinto appears as the background of the investigation and not as the plot axis of the film. Perhaps for this reason, his denunciation is more powerful since he paints a whole period painting.

This is another of those films that strongly recreates that period climate "behind the iron curtain." The staging uses a photograph and a successful eighties soundtrack and the police and personal intrigues of the detective (although they contain some predictable elements) are very well concocted and carried out, supported by the acting solvency to which we are accustomed to Polish fictions.