Ashes and Diamonds
Released 1958, directed by Andrezj Wajda
Maciek Chelmicki (Zbigniew Cybulski) is first introduced to us sprawled in the grass on a sunny day, at ease, his machine gun by his side, birds chirping. He stretches, yawns. A moment later he will kill two men in cold blood, the second on the threshold of a church, the man’s tweed jacket tufted by gunshots and finally bursting into flame. And this, it will transpire, was all a mistake. The men are not the communist officials whom Maciek was meant to assassinate. They worked at a cement factory. Yet rather than condemn him, Ashes and Diamonds will pull us back insistently to that catnap in the grass, that image of careless youth; nor will a dialectic be offered between innocence and experience. This is a film of facts and images which don’t blend, which often vibrate in opposition to each other; from the catalytic energy of their compressed placement comes style and plot.
For a fact: we are in Poland on May 8th 1945, the day that Germany surrendered in the war. Maciek is a foot soldier for the Polish Home Army, a young veteran who fought in the sewers in Warsaw. He reports to his friend and superior Andrezj (Adam Pawlikowski), who in turn reports to one Colonel Kotowicz (Artur Mlodnicki) – together they form a small fragment of a disintegrating force, persecuted by the Nazis and about to be persecuted again by the incoming Soviet-backed Stalinist government; they are soldiers fighting for a homeland that has been vanished.
Thinking themselves successful in their assassination Maciek and Andrezj repair to the local hotel. They aren’t elated, nor are they regretful; we can sense from the beginning that they’ve seen and done horrible things, and that their response to horror has become subtle. They understand and are familiar with horror, in that oft-fetishized film masculine sense they are professionals. Human professionals however – every character in the film is carefully granted their humanity – and they soon become aware that they have committed one of humanity’s defining errors by killing the wrong people. We already know this, we’re ahead of them, and the way that they get caught up is typical of how Ashes and Diamonds functions. The film is based on a novel, but compresses that novel’s more leisurely action into the span of twelve hours, afternoon to early morning. To do so it is tricksy – coincidences are not only allowed, they are encouraged, and whenever possible multiple zones of action are slotted into a single locale, allowing progress along various narrative and thematic tracks at once. Thus: Andrejz uses the public phone in the Monpol lobby to call Kotowicz and report his success. We are given a deep focus shot of the lobby, Andrejz’s face taking up half the screen in close-up; then in the middle distance Maciek loafs with a newspaper, and beyond him we have a clear view of the hotel entrance. As Andrejz talks, we see appear at the entrance the actual target of their attempt, Commissar Szczuka (Wacław Zastrzeżyński). He makes his way to reception, announces himself, Maciek hears his name, then rushes up to tell Andrejz, Andrejz tells Kotowicz, and there, in a neat little package, a single shot, we have victory turning to shame and moral squalor.
Szczuka is going to be killed by Maciek before the night is out, and so his humanity also must be given its due, in the limited time he has. He’s a powerful, heavyset figure. Our first encounter with him is on the road into town, when he comes upon the bodies of the men who died in his place; he faces the situation squarely, there is a touch of the tractor and a touch of the propagandist around him. A group of workers arrives on the scene and protests at the slaughter still consuming the country, even as the war has wound down; and we are given a bracing dose of retail politics as practiced in central Europe in 1945 when Szczuka personably delivers the message that any of them might die at any moment and it’s best not to think too much about it. Later we learn that he has a son whom he left behind during the war, and who ended up being raised by the wife of the anti-Communist Kotowicz – and in the film’s compressed style, not too long after we find out that this son has been captured with a band of partisan fighters and is being held at the local police station. It is while going to see his son that he is waylaid and shot by Maciek. The death scene is done outrageously, the old man staggering forward into the young man’s embrace, then the two sinking down together as fireworks rise to celebrate the war’s end – and there’s more where that came from; this is a film that glories in signs and wonders, filigree on filigree, an aesthetic exuberance to counterbalance the thanotic weight of the plot.
The rumpled, solid, and competent Szczuka may have been at least partly a sop to the censors – Ashes and Diamonds was made during a time when Poland was undergoing a period of relative openness, but there was still a line to be toed. Even aside from his politics and probity Szczuka is a character built to appeal precisely to the censorious class, to grey men in paper-piled offices (and suppose I should count myself among these – I found him moving). Maciek on the other hand is a Hero to the Youth. Cybulski modeled his performance on James Dean, but when you’re watching him that really isn’t relevant because he’s such a specific presence, nerve-endings rubbed raw, a mouth full of charming teeth, a whipcord body in constant squirming motion, like a cartoon character in one of those meta pieces where the artist is after them with an eraser and they need to contort themselves out of being deleted. He wants to live and be broody and effervescent, but instead he’s on the doomy path of constant murder and then (no doubt) being murdered. He ends the film dead in a trash heap and it is, in fact, a waste.
After Maciek and Andrejz realize what has happened they settled in for a night of waiting, aiming to try at Szczuka again before moving out to a new assignment the next morning. Maciek takes a room and kills time at the bar, where he flirts with bartender Krystyna (Ewa Krzyżewska). He invites her to his room, not expecting her to come; but she does, and they talk over the unremitting carnage of their lives – both of her parents dead in the war, he with no family at all. They’re so cut off from the normal avenues of human happiness that it doesn’t feel as forced as it might for them to fall in love in the space of a few hours. There is something enviable about them: suffering has set them free to try out new modes of living, that might after all prove more satisfactory than the folkways that lead Europe to this pass. But Maciek still hasn’t shared the full scope of his experience with her. They go out for a night walk, passing rain-slick soldiers singing martial songs, exploring a bombed out church where a crucified Jesus hangs upended, his nimbus-pierced head scenically dividing them. The church just happens to house the bodies of the two men Maciek killed earlier in the day, their bodies waiting for burial. The couple stumbles on the corpses; they are covered under a sheet, and Maciek rips it away. He wants to achieve an anguished, perfect honesty with Krystyna. We hear her piercing scream, but when they part a few minutes later she asks him to give up the life, to stay with her and build something new but not free of convention. There’s something to be said for growing old together.
Ashes and Diamonds is a favorite of both Scorsese and Coppola, and there are qualities in it that flow easily into the modern American crime film, particularly the mafia variant, particularly the pulp/art mafia variant. There are the nimble plot elisions to skip from stimulus to stimulus, the tense will-he-or-won’t-he kill scenes (or one, at least), the easy way with a broad aesthetic, the care with which violence is scumbled with the everyday – when Maciek goes to pick up his machine gun in the first scene, he first has to brush off the ants that have crawled over it while he dozed. Above all there is the intense interest in the set-apartness of people who are comfortable killing (or performing other major moral transgressions – stealing vast amounts of money in The Wolf of Wall Street for example). These people are not square, and their coolness and liveliness is extremely attractive, particularly when not accompanied by authorial admonishments; and then when they do have inklings of reform the sheer depth of their sinning gives any attempt at redemption pleasingly high stakes.
All of that is present in Ashes and Diamonds, with the crucial difference being that this is not a crime film, but a war film, a war to end all war films – no aspect of any character can be free of the fact of the war. No one here is square – the idea is laughable in this context; everyone is in a heightened state of afflicting and being afflicted. In one scene we see the hotel’s manager comforting a crying woman. Why is she so sad? Well her fiancé has just been killed (he was one of the innocents shot by Maciek). Is she sure? Probably it wasn’t really him? She’s sure! She’s certain! Well forget about it, he’s gone – and he rolls her onto the bed, it becoming apparent that he is paying to sleep with her. There is that scene in Scorsese’s Casino where Joe Pesci’s Nicky, having offered a modicum of comfort and protection to the character played by Sharon Stone, transitions immediately to demanding oral sex. Here, not even comfort is offered – the veneers have been scoured away, and characters transact as necessary.
Or consider Goodfellas: where Henry Hill freely chooses his life as a gangster, Maciek’s choice was made for him by world historical events; where Henry is very much appealed to, sold on the life – a consumer making a choice – Maciek is crushed. There is a sort of competitive sadness between the two modes – and in a sense Henry Hill is the bleaker case, since he freely chooses his own debasement, and in the end there isn’t a flicker of useful soul left in him. Maciek is what and where he is because of forces beyond his control, and he certainly still has worth (a message that has perhaps become more subversive over time, as the context of total war recedes and his murders become more pronounced without their placement in a general fog of brutality). Throughout, this exterior pressure on Maciek – on everyone – is emphasized; and traits that in other contexts might act as markers of cool here are markers of pain, of conflict. The sunglasses he wears (which after the film came out became fashion icons in Poland) are because he damaged his eyes by living in the sewers and away from the sun for so long while fighting in Warsaw. And when, during a cabaret scene, a chanteuse (Hanka Lewicka) steps to the microphone and we expect perhaps a sophisticated, hard-bitten torch song, she begins instead, Do you see those ruins on the hilltop? There your foe hides like the rat…
NOTES
Two films I’ve written about here share an energy – or more – with Ashes and Diamonds. Floating Clouds deals with the same tensions, embodied in a romance, between the transcendent dislocations of the war and the appeals of normalcy; while Love and Anarchy is essentially the same plot, only stretched over a greater period of subjective time, and with the already high degree of cynicism even further increased.
