Next up on the Letterboxd Challenge is a previously unseen film from the Polish Film School Movement. The good news here is that “previously unseen” is filtering out basically nothing at all for us. We ended up selecting this, a 1958 film about the end of WW2.

And so I was settling in for a heroic film about Polish soldiers kicking out the last Nazis; but yeah, that’s not how Poland rolls. What I forgot is that of course “post-WW2” for Poland means falling under the Soviet Union’s control. And so this is a movie about Polish soldiers who, having just defeated the Germans, are now fighting Communists to try to preserve a free Poland.

And so this is a remarkably ambiguous film. The protagonist — a dude who wears sunglasses all the time and who seems extremely cool — starts off the movie by botching an assassination of a Communist official and killing two completely innocent civilians (one of them just back from German work camps, and my god how terrible to have survived that and then died in a random fuck-up peacetime killing). He then spends the middle of the movie being irresolute about doing more killing, and drowning his sorrows in an absolute ton of liquor and a tryst with an equally unhappy waitress, before going on to complete his mission and ending up shot dead on a garbage heap at the end.

What’s maybe the most surprising to me is that they could make this movie in Poland in 1958, which was still obviously Communist. Looking up the historical context, apparently there was a thaw in state censorship after Stalin’s death; but also apparently it wasn’t a complete thaw. And I suppose if I try to think like a Soviet censor… well, if you don’t automatically hear “Communist official” and assume that it’s a villain, then this is really a tragic story about a doomed nationalist ideology and how it led a bunch of men to acts of savage violence and pointless deaths.

And maybe the genius of the movie is that it’s not not that. I think the movie is ultimately sympathetic to its protagonist, but there’s no question that he’s a flawed person who meets with failure in the end. Whether despite or because of censorship, this ends up being a rich and complex movie about a difficult time in history.