Katyn - Film Review

Surely Polish cinema's finest and most distinguished filmmaker, trailblazing and Oscar winning director Andrzej Wajda here turns his attention rather close to home with a historical piece regarding the Katyn Massacre of 1940.

The incident, the mass execution of roughly 20,000 Polish army officers in the titular forest, is covered with a rather unexpected angle, shrouding the actual atrocity in mystery and focussing on its ramifications over the course of the following five years, in particular the burden of unknowing carried by two families.

It starts in 1939, with Poland attacked from both sides by German and Russian armies exploiting their mutual non-aggression pact. After being forced into surrender, the military's officer corps is rounded up by Soviet forces, taken as POWs ready to be transitted to Eastern gulags. Anna (Maja Ostaszewska) is the wife of one of said men, Andrzej (Artur Zmijewski), and after a desperare farewell, has to watch him being taken by train out of the country. In the same shipment of prisoners is his friend Jerzy (Andrzej Chyra) and a senior General (Jan Englert) with his own worried family left behind.

With the Soviets and Germans now in control of the country, Anna and her daughter (Wiktoria Gasiewska) face an uncertain fate, endangered by Anna's status as an Officer's wife, and attempt to dodge the attention of the occupation while awaiting news of Andrzej. All hope is lost following the revelation that a mass grave filled with Polish POWs has been discovered in the Katyn forest, and the released Jerzy bringing news that Andrzej is seemingly one of the dead. As the years pass, and the nature of the occupation mutating, the blame for the crime is pinned on the Germans, despite the apparently blatant part played by the Soviets, and efforts are made by the survivors to establish just what happened in the woods that fateful morning.

One of the things that makes Katyn stand out from similar efforts, aside from it shedding light on an oddly unheard of incident, is that it takes a different view of the matter. Wajda, who's own father was killed in the massacre, instead pays heed to the uncertainty over the victims (the unreliable Katyn list), to the loved ones of those killed, and to the cover up instigated by the Soviet Union's secret police. The maddening nature of the Russian occupation's unaccountability for the deaths is a keystone of the story, and the effects of the denial on the population are undeniable.

As such, the film's big moment, the actual mass murder itself, is only shown and illuminated in gut wrenching, flesh crawling style at the very end, the final revelation as proof seemingly emerges and the prospect of justice seems far closer than ever before. That closure is granted to Anna, who has spent five years simply not knowing what to believe, provides a human conclusion to the story.

While Katyn is a noble and occasionally powerful film, enfused with a strong sense of purpose and moral equity, its main flaw is that for much of the running time, it tries to do too much in too little time, nearly tarnishing the impact of the conclusion, and the dichtonomy of the piece. While Wajda's directing is excellent, music clinical and acting (particularly from We're All Christs star Andrzej Chyra, and Maja Ostaszewska) first rate, the film's uneven pacing becomes a problem during the bumpy middle, and the introduction of new characters is an awkwardly handled process, with the likes of Magdalena Cielecka's Agnieszka stepping into the plot with no real introduction or apparent reason, and then moving out again in baffling circumstances. The small, poignant role of Anna's nephew Tadeusz (Antoni Pawlicki), an eager young student torn between family honour and his education within the occupation, is a brief but highly effective exception.

With this, Wajda is clearly striving to go beyond the norms of such war horror fare and open the door on the equally insidious house of cards upon which the dishonest Soviet occupation mounted their lies about the incident, and also by bringing into play the other side of the tragedy, the loss felt by those left behind by the appaling act. While at times he succeeds, and certainly raises awareness of the darkest of dark moments within the 20th Century, an occasional lack of focus means that Katyn falls short of its targets, and doesn't quite reach the heights it really should.

Certainly effective filmmaking, it doesn't quite live up to its own billing, and such can be viewed as flawed rather than ill-judged, good instead of great.


8/10