It's the third time Schlondorff has focused on individuals fighting the power, following The Legend of Rita (2000) and The Ninth Day (2004). This time, in a wry echo of his heroine who dared socialism to live up to its philosophy, he turns Socialist Realism back on itself by using its broad, bold, rabble-rousing recipes to clobber the system that embraced them so ardently and self-servingly. That it works as powerfully as it does, however, is not due to its wide-bore proletarian breadth, but to Schlondorff's ability to personalize the struggle by giving us in finely etched detail the particulars of Anna's life starting with Anna, rivetingly embodied by Katharina Thalbach.
Although he interweaves copious newsreel footage into his narrative, and the last part of the film is docudrama as the strike grows, deepens and spreads, Schlondorff avoids straight biofilm, opting instead for what he calls "a ballad inspired by true events." In other words, he fictionalizes and telescopes for dramatic purposes, starting with changing the heroine's name to Agnieszka. He asks our patience as the film, seemingly meanderingly, gives us the minutiae of Agneiszka's hard-scrabble life in the dreary neighborhood and the huge, gritty shipyard where we first see her as a welder, who conquers her fear of heights and, touchingly coached by her bright schoolboy son, her semi-literacy to get a better job as a crane operator that would enable her to avoid night shifts so she can be at home to care for the boy.
With her big-eyed face and often surprisingly sprightly moves, Thalbach seems a stocky, politicized Giulietta Masina. She's not playing a clown here, but you feel she could be a good one. Life doesn't permit her to be a naïf, as it did Masina's characters, but her ability to project purity of outlook a trait she also shares with Masina -- proves one of her strengths. In a wryly humorous beginning, we see her feted at a union banquet, where her overachievement is rewarded with a prize a far from top-of-the-line black-and-white TV that just about fits into her cramped flat. In the apartment building, she later meets a sweet trumpeter (Dominque Horwitz), and when it's clear he opens his heart to the boy as well as to her, they marry. What Richard Baseheart's liberating sprite was to Masina's Gelsomina in La Strada, Horwitz's buoyant-spirited musician is to Agenieszka. But scarcely has their honeymoon at a Baltic resort begun than he dies of a heart attack. Agnieszka just can't catch a break. The film's lighter elements recede entirely as her entry into legend approaches. Because her reputation as a worker is so unimpeachable (it even angers some of her fellow workers, who rightly feel they're made to seem slackers by Agnieszka) that she forces a few changes. When the lunch hour is shortened to 30 minutes to meet increased production quotas, and Agnieszka's complaint that they much walk over a mile to the canteen is ignored, she sets up a soup kitchen at the job site to keep everyone fed. That Schlondorff filmed at the actual Gdansk shipyard (where he also filmed parts of The Tin Drum there) is a big plus. Its size and scale dwarf the workers into ant status. It's an environment that makes a statement a fact not lost on Maurice Jarre's industrial rock-flavored, hammerstroke-heavy score.
It's a workplace where corners are cut and safety is a low priority. When 21 workers are incinerated in a fire that flared up after they were forced to weld in the hold of a ship being loaded with fuel, and a cover-up is attempted to avoid compensating the widows, Agnieszka, enraged, swings into action. The bosses back down, and although neither knows it, the stage has been set for the history-making strike to come after a disgruntled electrician named Lech Walesa is fired and organizes workers. Agnieszka, whose fearless confrontation of bosses, including the union chief with whom she had been intimate, is fired on trumped-up charges (she's accused of theft because she kept her dead husband's trumpet company property as a memento). The rest is literally history.
But it's history we only know a part of. Here, Agnieszka is portrayed as the real spirit behind the strike, and of not giving in as Waelsa is willing to when the workers' immediate demands are met. We believe in Thalbach's Agnieszka when she urges Walesa to hang tough and tells the workers not to cave for short-term gains when they could get more. Besides, she says, to do so would be to betray streetcar drivers and workers at other shipyards who stuck their necks out by going on sympathy strikes. Taking heart from the Papacy of Poland's John Paul II, the staunchly patriotic and religious Agnieszka lights a fire of idealism and principle under the workers. In short, she trumps Walesa's take-what-you-can-get realpolitik with uncompromising solidarity. It isn't often that you walk away from a reality-based film feeling that everybody got what they deserved, but as we see the now-aged Agnieszka walking along a beach in 2005, realizing a long-deferred dream, we realize that this is one of them.
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by Jay Carr
