Film Review: Andrzej Munk - Bad Luck (Poland, 1960)

Andrzej Munk – Bad Luck (Zezowate szczescie, 1960)



At the beginning of the film an old man begs an official not to throw him out. He doesn’t want to start again and this place where he is now is the only place where his bad luck has not followed him. He begins to tell his life story, to illustrate just what fate has had in store for him.

So begins the story of Jan Piszczyk, the son of a tailor in Warszaw. We follow his childhood years, his luckless university days and how he meets his first love when he is hired to give her private tuition. We see him as a soldier, a prisoner of war, a lawyer in post-war Krakow and a party official. He streaks through life like a shooting star of misfortune. Whenever something good appears in Piszczyk’s life it is simply the gloss and veneer of some underlying and inevitable bad luck.

Walking through a field towards the military post that has just recruited him, Piszczyk is bombed by German planes, running in slapstick fashion between heads of coleslaw while the bombs explode around him. Heavily delayed he finally arrives in Zegrze, the military school – but it is deserted, raided and empty. He clambers through the rooms, finally finding what he was looking for: a gleaming gala uniform. After he had seen the laughingstock of his school escorting two ladies to a ball, he knew that to count for something he would have to find a uniform (either a priest’s or an officer’s). He is so enchanted by the image of himself in a uniform that he remains completely oblivious to a jeep of German soldiers who enter Zegrze, looking for Polish officers. When they enter the room behind him, he is still lost in a Narcissus gaze at his own image and is promptly captured. What can he tell them? That he just put the uniform on? What, furthermore, can he tell his fellow POWs? He makes up stories that make him out to be a war hero, almost implicating himself in a truly dangerous escape attempt, from which he is only “saved” when another graduate from Zegrze arrives in the prison camp and unmasks him…

Between a rock and a hard place would be a deeply comfortable position for Jan Piszczyk, as he continues tumbling and scratching out a place for himself, always waiting for the inevitable stroke of bad luck. The only time when nothing happens is when he is helping out at his father’s farm since, in his own words, fate probably considered cutting my ears off with a scythe a cheap trick.

A deep sadness is at the core of the upside down world that is presented in Bad Luck – in fact, things are so sad that all you can do is laugh. Cowardice leads to being hailed as a hero while no good deed, as the proverb says, goes unpunished. Piszczyk is cresting the waves of turbulence and as one upset leads him to another, we can get a glimpse at the upturned world of post-war Poland where opportunity goes hand in hand with paranoia and only robust fatalistic humour can get you through. It comes as a small but still very poignant surprise when we learn at the end of the film that the place Piszczyk is so loathe to leave is the state prison.

Andrzej Munk is not a very resonant name today - in 1961 the director from Krakow died aged thirty-nine in a car accident, leaving behind a small but impressive resumé. However, some of Munk's themes, like the cruel jokes that fate plays, turn up mixed into the more metaphysical and gothic films of one of Poland's most famous filmmakers, Roman Polanski, who was an assistant director on Bad Luck.

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A Crucifixion in their Headlights

A review of Michael Ondaatje's novel Anil's Ghost...

Ondaatje is a frightfully good stylist for the book removes us to a strange and heightened kind of poetic reality – but what he chooses to fill this reality with is (with a number of extraordinary exceptions) anything but poetic. He writes about Sri Lanka, his own native country, during the last years of its unspeakably brutal civil war. Acts of brutality are random, inevitable and filled with the inhuman creativity of torture – all painted against a tropical darkness, all of them (except for the last one) committed by nameless and faceless shadows. And so the books main concern is with identity. To find out the identity of a murder victim of whom nothing but an exhumed skeleton named Sailor remains is the main point that drives the plot. The heroine, Anil, almost expatriate Sri Lankan and forensic anthropologist, is a rootless creature whose very life is filled with so many questions about identity that she seems almost protean; even her name was, rather memorably, acquired in a deal with Anil’s own brother. Through Anil’s eyes we are introduced to more questions about identities. Who are Sarath, her colleague, Gamini, Sarath’s brother, and Ananda, the artist who “rebuilds” Sailor for them? From Anil’s conversations, her thoughts and actions we can glean many intimate and immediate details about those men’s pasts and inner worlds, but nonetheless we will close the book with not a single question answered about who they are. This is not meant to condemn the author – quite the contrary. It evokes many things: the self destruction of a country , of a national entity, embroiled in civil war; the very essence of violence, which renders all questions of identity futile, except maybe for the one essential to any conflict – who is the victim?; another essential matter – one of identity itself…we aren’t offered any authorial or definite voice, not even the conceit of a knowledgeable teller. Ondaatje achieves such realistic and convincing people that it is always them speaking to us and so we are faced with the same questions we would be faced with when looking upon people that we have known for a long time, people we have shared intimacies with…we know them from such close quarters that we cannot look at them from any other perspective and their minutiae become absolute to us. We look on helplessly as they move through the chaos, knowing that they will not offer a heroic solution.
The book moves along at a feverish pace, broken only by a few moments of contemplation. The protagonists are spurned by their own merciless ghosts, never meant to escape. Solace is a moment, reading a cheap book in a bloodstained coat, or engulfed in work with one’s earphones on. They move from one state to the next, unable to reflect, their senses heightened, always aware and yet trying their best not to be aware of the importance and necessity of their actions. But one is never allowed to forget what drives them – fierce ghosts of sadness, guilt, pain, loss, confusion. Gamini is a doctor who has lost himself in his work and to an addiction to stimulants after his wife left him. Sarath’s wife is dead and he has closed himself from apparently everything. Anada’s wife has vanished and he drinks heavily. Anil has left everything behind, for no reason at all, haunted by memories of her married ex-lover.
It is strange, for the tale seems desperate and depressing only in hindsight and reflection. The language moves and carries us like angelic dirges through the mud and mire of this particular hell, plunging us deep into the fever and frenzy, so inescapable it almost seems placid at times even when describing atrocities. It’s rare to feel the effects of a collapsing world so immediately through a book and through language, but this is where Ondaatje has succeeded utterly. There is no time to think and whatever beauty or comfort there is along the rushing path, it has to be absorbed immediately. We are left to wonder about how much of our identity or the perceived lack of identity comes from our surroundings and the stability, perceived or actual, of our world. Memories of the time before the war have almost been obliterated from everyone’s minds and the few moments when Sri Lanka’s rich history becomes palpable and enters the text, it offers an immense solace. A certainty that whatever happens, however cruel and hellish it is, it is only a chapter and a brief one at that.

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