I understand that good reviews for this movie have been placed mostly because people expect to see something very nasty and cruel about communist regimes during cold war in Europe. But everything in this movie is dramatically overdone, overemphasized, and very badly done. We just watched some completely ridiculous scenes - everybody hates some poor Polish artist in Poland, who has no one leg and one arm, just because he said something like "the art is autonomous", nobody has a pity for him, even a woman who cooks for him or a woman who sells food, or a man who sells the paint, etc. For instance, there are some scenes where a woman who cooks for him for years denies him a plate of food, because he has no some small change to pay. Well, this is sadly typical for liberal capitalism, not for communist countries. Also, the fact that authorities threw him out of the university does not mean that immediately every cleaning lady will hate him, and leave him without food. Also it does not mean that nobody will give him any work, and nobody will make any effort to improve his situations. But in this film it is all about the misfortune of this man, it is just a straight line to poverty, and there is no any "higher meaning", or auto-reflection or catharsis in the movie. And at some point somebody says "he who does not work, does not eat in communism". Where did they hear that? This was not a communist parole at all. Communist parole was "everybody gets according to their needs", whatever it meant. But, its something completely different.
I don't understand why Wajda made this black and white unintelligent and embarrassing movie, with nothing but an anti-communist propaganda pamphlet in it. Communism was a totalitarian system with its bad doctrines and flows, but, in general, artists, writers and intellectuals were better kept and better treated in such systems than in capitalism. They had social benefits of state socialist system that did not exist in capitalist countries. They were often banned from working, that is true, but even then, they were not thrown to the streets or left without basic existence, because this is not how communist states work. They may have been imprisoned, but still, they were not left to die of starvation at the streets, beggars or homeless people were not a "thing" in communist countries. Starving when you have no work - this is typical for western capitalism, not for communist countries. So this film brings a lot of tendentious, bleak, monotonous propaganda against Poland of 1950s, and it even shows Polish people as dull, cruel, merciless, insensitive and horrible people. Really bad and offensive film without any philosophical depth (and I am not even a Polish, but was hard for me to watch).
I don't understand why Wajda made this black and white unintelligent and embarrassing movie, with nothing but an anti-communist propaganda pamphlet in it. Communism was a totalitarian system with its bad doctrines and flows, but, in general, artists, writers and intellectuals were better kept and better treated in such systems than in capitalism. They had social benefits of state socialist system that did not exist in capitalist countries. They were often banned from working, that is true, but even then, they were not thrown to the streets or left without basic existence, because this is not how communist states work. They may have been imprisoned, but still, they were not left to die of starvation at the streets, beggars or homeless people were not a "thing" in communist countries. Starving when you have no work - this is typical for western capitalism, not for communist countries. So this film brings a lot of tendentious, bleak, monotonous propaganda against Poland of 1950s, and it even shows Polish people as dull, cruel, merciless, insensitive and horrible people. Really bad and offensive film without any philosophical depth (and I am not even a Polish, but was hard for me to watch).