Brick Wall

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

MAN OF MARBLE

Directed by Andrzej Wajda

Screenplay by Aleksander Scibor-Rylski

It is as if some pages from the script for Citizen Kane unaccountably got mixed up with several passages from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and, instead of sorting them out, the movie people went ahead and shot the thing anyway. In Polish.

Like Kane, the picture concerns a film maker (Krystyna Janda) who seeks to penetrate the past of a heroic--or, anyway, well-publicized--figure who has fallen from grace. Edgy, abrasive, in secure, she is in her own right a fascinating figure of the moment as she fights her way through a state bureaucracy that would prefer she found an other subject. Her Mr. Deeds is a brick layer named Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz). Earnest and innocent, he pioneered a faster method of doing his job in the Stalinist '50s. But one man's technological breakthrough is an other's speedup: though the government publicizes him as a Stakhanovite, he is resented by other workers. One of them passes him hot bricks during a demonstration, maiming him. When his best friend is accused of the crime, Mateusz fights to free him and is himself placed on show trial. After destalinization he is rehabilitated, but, with his life shattered, he chooses simply to drift out of history.

To American audiences this may sound rather obscure. But Director Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds, Kanal) is a subtle and often witty ironist. He is also a wise and compassionate artist who never allows a political message to dominate the human story. Though they never meet, the man and the woman become, in effect, antagonists. Each represents the idealism of a particular moment. The crusading journalist must reveal the "secrets" of an evil system; he must resist, as he al ways has, the disaffection implicit in self-awareness and worldliness. Better to bury himself in the bitter anonymity that she succeeds in penetrating only after his death.

This rich, energetic, superbly acted film is full of marvelously developed subsidiary characters: an old cameraman who has seen it all; Mateusz's exwife, declining into drunkenness; a veteran moviemaker, prize-laden and softly cynical. All are witnesses to history, shedding light on the way large issues affect little lives. At this time, when the inner contradictions of Polish Communism are once again spread out for the world to see, theirs is testimony that should be heard.

--By Richard Schickel

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