Katyn - dir. Andrzej Wajda

On Thursday, L. and I visited what must be our favourite arthouse cinema, the Mayfair Curzon, in London's West End to see Katyn, a Polish film about the massacre of over 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in 1940.

The massacre was carried out by the Red Army. As the saying goes, history is written by the winners, so, after the war was over, the Soviet Union spent the next forty five years blaming the Nazis for the atrocity. Only in 1989 did the then Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, admit his country's responsibility. 

Katyn looks at the massacre through the eyes of Anna (Maja Ostaszewska) and Agnieszka (Magdalena Cielecka), wives of two Polish offiers killed at Katyn. At the beginning of the film, Anna actually finds her husband, Andrzej (Artur Zimjewski) in the loosely guarded prisoner of war camp and begs him to leave with her. But his loyalty to the army is absolute and won't be persuaded.

Subsequently, Anna narrowly escapes deportation to a concentration camp thanks to a kindly Soviet officer. She and her daughter, Nika, depart for Krakow, where they await a knock on the door that will never come.

As the film progresses, other characters flit past us. I'm afraid I don't remember all the names, but we see Andrzej's comrade Jerzy, who due to mistaken identity with Andrzej escaped being sent to Katyn, and who ends up a drunk officer on the Red Army. Despite this, he is never portrayed as a bad man. His sad end makes him a tragic one. There is also Andrzej's blonde sister whose attempt to place a gravestone marking her brother's death in a graveyard ends with it being smashed and her being interrogated by the secret police. Her defiance in the face of their threats is both cool and remarkable. Then there is also Andrzej's other sister, brunette, who has compromised with the Soviet regime, by joining the staff of Krakow university. 

Katyn is not an action film. It had the air of a dramatic reconstruction such as you might see in a television documentary. It could also be called a meditation on the consequences of the massacre, and more broadly, the war in general, on the people of Krakow. 

That the Soviet Union (through Stalin, Beria and the Politburo) was responsible for the Katyn massacre is without doubt, but how accurate Katyn is in its particulars, I don't know. One thing that is certain, though, is that in parts, the film is very graphic. At the end of the film, we see a number of Polish officers being executed - always with a bullet in the back of the head. While this scene could be justified on the grounds of enabling the viewer to see what really happened, I personally felt that we saw a few more shootings than was really necessary. But by far the worse scene was actual footage that was shot by the Nazis when they discovered and opened the graves in 1943. They hold up to the camera one body and its lolling head, or rather, what was left of it, as it had severely decomposed. A horrible sight.

Given its subject matter, Katyn could have been a very visually very grim film, but it steers a middle road in that respect. This allows the human story to breath. Unfortunately, the story did jump about a fair bit, meaning that I was occasionally rather confused as to where in the timeline of events we were. But this criticism should not deflect from the very obvious quality of the film, in terms of its production values, acting performances and narrative intensity, all of which were very high.

Katyn is a very good antidote to the more unrealistic war films, showing as it does, what really happens in wars and what they do to people - from the Nazi officer who shouts his condolences to Agnieska to the young boy on the eve of a possible university career who is run over and killed as he tries to escape from Red Army officers after tearing down a pro-Soviet poster and, of course, the Polish officers at the heart of the film. I thoroughly recommend it to you.