Ashes and Diamonds

Wondering how this film ever came out of Poland brings to mind the story of a Russian worker who left his plant each evening with a wheelbarrow full of sawdust. For a while the guards inspected the sawdust; finding nothing, they inspected more carefully, and finally called the NKVD. After several weeks, special security agents flew in to check the sawdust grain by grain; they too, found nothing. Weeks after the worker had been cleared of suspicion, a friend asked him what he was stealing. He answered, "wheelbarrows."

Ashes and Diamonds tells the story of Maciek Chelmicki, a young partisan who in the closing hours of The Second World War finds no victory in a Communist Poland. The incoming Communist bureaucracy smells as bad to him as the old one. In the Red Army he senses a new conqueror. The only affinity he feels is toward Szczuka, a toughened Communist leader whom he recognizes as a fellow activist and fighter.

Both Maciek and Szczuka long for peace and for the loving which war never left them time to take part in. Yet both must continue the way of life that they are convinced accomplishes things on this planet. Victory has played a joke on each: the Communist, now responsible to the Russians, has ceased to be a patriot; the partisan who now finds himself killing other Poles has become a terrorist.

To Jerzy Andrzejewski, who wrote the novel and collaborated on the screenplay, the only basic adversaries are life and death. Political opposition, he tries to show, is a superficial division of men. As for English and German bullets, "it makes no differences when you're on the receiving end."

While Director Andrzej Wajda creates several scenes that are both eloquent and taut (Szczuka's death in the arms of Maciek says all it has to say in three seconds), he is also extremely wasteful in his use of detail. It could further be observed that much of the genuinely sophisticated material and technique in this Polish film would be taken for extraneous artiness in an equivalent French or Italian production.

From his minor actors, in particular, Wajda has drawn some striking performances. Several of the tangential characters are turned into important human beings, worth pausing over, and thinking about. Although Zbigniew Cybulski occassionally makes Maciek's confusion seem invalid, he always makes it understandable, and what more I could say about him and the other leads would be entirely favorable.