Movie Review: Katyn - Page 2

The film then splits into two main narrative strands. Now being held huddled inside a repurposed church and including Andrzej and fellow officer Jerzy, the captives contemplate their collective fate; some anticipate help from the Allies – surely they cannot do without tens of thousands of trained soldiers – while others are far more pessimistic. What fate too for their country? Divided up between the Germans and the Russians, or the bloody battleground when those two ideologically opposed bedfellows almost inevitably turn against each other and come to blows?

The second strand, and more of the film's focus, settles on the lives of the families of those being held captive. Anna nervously waits for news of her husband's return. It transpires that in Soviet-occupied areas, wives of officers are swiftly being rounded up too, and she learns that she must escape across the demarcations line to the Nazi-controlled western half of the country in order to survive. Andrzej's father, a prominent academic, has been captured too, and likely to meet a similar fate to that of his son. Time passes, but Anna refuses to lose hope. News of the Katyn massacre eventually reaches them, gleefully reported through public loudspeakers by their German occupiers, along with newsreel footage showing the mass graves and the method of execution used, apparently typical of the Bolshevik regime.

The war ends, and one might expect the story to end too, yet as with Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers (2006), the disappearance of armed conflict from the story merely marks the end of the film's first act, and the propaganda war has only just begun. The new Communist government of Poland wipes its hands of the massacre, claiming that it took place in 1941, and so at that point in time it had to have been perpetrated by the Nazis. We are shown through several narrative threads how this lie was perpetuated through a multitude of official channels: a woman is not allowed to have the correct date of her brother's death placed on his gravestone; a university applicant whose father died at Katyn must 'correct' his resume in order to be accepted, and Jerzy himself, who survived the POW camp and is now an officer in the new national army, must censor himself in order to keep his job. The very same newsreel footage shown earlier as illustrating the hallmarks of Russian executions has now become illustrative of the SS.

Wajda saves the film's most harrowing scenes for the coda, a reconstruction of the actual killing processes themselves. Despite all of the portrayals of the horrors of World War Two seen in films previous, there is something uniquely chilling about these final moments. The methodical nature of the killers is rendered here with a savage eye for seemingly trivial detail, detail which only heightens the feeling of appalling horror: a dark basement with its blood-soaked floor carelessly rinsed after each victim, and the metal ramp used to slide the prone bodies up to ground level to be dumped on the pile of other corpses. A particularly brave piece of filmmaking for the director, whose own father was one such victim who met this most horrible of fates.

Article Author: Bags

Bags is a writer based in Bristol, UK. He likes the idea of being called a 'cultural historian', though 'boring film and music geek' is probably closer to the mark. Ouch.

Visit Bags's author page — Bags's Blog