Andrzej Wajda on ‘Rough Treatment’
Rough Treatment is a departure from your previous work, a far cry from the dramatic current of post-mortems on history. It also differs in style and tone. Where would you yourself place it in your oeuvre?
Anyone who has pulled something off is confronted with the dilemma of whether or not to back out. As soon as I realised that I had succeeded in contributing something to what you call the ‘post-mortem’ theme, I called it a day. After making a number of literary adaptations I sensed with The Promised Land that I had reached the end of that particular line. The Shadow Line proved me right. So I quit, though I will of course occasionally return. My latest film marks, I think, the beginning of something new, something that is still in the process of crystallization – and in the sphere of form, style, means of expression as well. It signposts a course I’d like to follow.
The notion of responsibility in art sometimes becomes blurred and eludes rigid delineation. What are the limits for an artist who creates an image of reality in a subjective manner guided by his own interests and emotions?
One point is worth remembering. The artist is answerable for the picture of reality which he creates. But what art depicts cannot be regarded as the sole reality. To do so is ludicrous. On leaving the cinema you go home to the supermarket, to your workbench, all of which exist beyond the reality on screen! If our lives were just one long session at the cinema, I would probably have to bear that in mind, change my perspective, look for a different frame of reference. What I show on film is derived from the realities which surround us. Films cannot be held responsible for, say, the malpractices of the bureaucracy nor, for that matter, is it their job to make detailed diagnoses of the functioning of various institutions or to find answers to specific problems. They ought to illuminate various aspects of reality and I see no reason why I should feel inhibited if the matters involved are awkward or even drastic. We frequently tend to be more apprehensive of the effects of a movie than of the demonstrable existence of controversial situations. Yet it’s a fact that the showing of something in a critical light is, if anything, a source of satisfaction, a kind of lightning conductor for tensions.
Interview by Malgorzata Dipont, KINO, February 1979
SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
A contemporary review
The Polish title of Rough Treatment, which translates as ‘without anaesthetic’, alludes to the sequence in which Jerzy has a tooth unceremoniously pulled. The extraction, for the audience at least, comes as a surprise: the dentist, Dr. Jackowicz, is a friend of Ewa’s and has been chatting to Jerzy about family matters-even smoking in a rather unhygenic manner-when suddenly the pliers are produced. It is the unexpectedness, perhaps more than the injustice, of what happens to Jerzy that marks the angry tone of Wajda’s oblique moral tale.
Rough Treatment can be seen, on at least one level, as a companion piece to Man of Marble, made a year earlier in 1977. The victims in the two films come from opposite ends of the social spectrum, both are successful in their different ways, and both are silently dispensed with. Krystyna Janda, the investigative film-maker in Man of Marble and here the silent Agata, plays the weathervane in both films: in the former she is Poland’s moral voice, in the latter the small voice of the country’s undecided, her final remarks echoing ironically – to the audience but not to herself.
In a way, however, Rough Treatment, being of the present, is the more interesting of the two. It is less about the suppression of opposition in Poland than the ways in which ordinary people accommodate to it as a fact of life. Rough Treatment is webbed with suspicion and duplicity: as in Man of Marble, the most chilling moments are those when the official face is blandest – when Ewa’s divorce lawyer, in a bustling office, calmly talks of ways of obtaining evidence; when Ola returns from Moscow without explanation, presumably departing from a favoured position after a discreet diplomatic hint. In Man of Marble, a man simply disappears from a small office and the official who has been questioning him, like a conjuror, effects not to be surprised by the sleight of hand.
No one disappears in Rough Treatment, but Jerzy, played with weather-beaten solidity by Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, is met by that same look of incomprehension when he asks for explanations. The worldly-wise (that is, astutely careful) Jerzy finds the ground cut from under him. Perhaps his faulty gas cooker really does blow up accidentally (we are given no suggestion that it does not, and Wajda is a careful director). Had he survived, though, he might well have found himself pushed upstairs like his friend Bronski, who goes to Paris under no delusions that he has been bought off.
Jerzy enjoys his celebrity, and he was potentially susceptible. Nothing is easy: Jacek defeats the old pragmatist Jerzy in a debate on a literary prize, but his victory is taken away – as perhaps it wouldn’t have been from the experienced correspondent – when he appears on TV for the first time and finds himself edited into saying the opposite of what he meant. The skill of Wajda and his scriptwriters Agnieska Holland and Krzysztof Zaleski is to broaden the picture by blurring the boundaries between personal and political deceit. The maid brings Jerzy’s daughter to his flat on the morning after the drunken party, full of complaints against her mistress. Then suddenly she sees Agata, in her underwear, walk through the room and a truth though perhaps not a truth-dawns and the screen is washed for a second in blue (a directorial underlining). How easy, Wajda suggests, it is to allow ourselves to be deceived – or misunderstood.
John Pym, Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1981
Rough Treatment Bez Znieczulenia
Director: Andrzej Wajda
Production Companies: Zespol Filmowy ‘X’, Film Polski
Executive Producer: Barbara Pec-Slesicka
Production Supervisors: Alina Klobukowska, Malgorzata Pakula, Bozena Michalska, Tomasz Bek
TV Sequences: Mariusz Walter, Tomasz Debinski, Gabriela Milobedzka, Henryk Babulewicz
Assistant Directors: Krystyna Grochowicz, Krzysztof Tchorzewski, Jolanta Jedynak
Screenplay: Agnieszka Holland, Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zaleski
Director of Photography: Edward Klosinski
Camera Operators: Janusz Kalicinski, Jan Ossowski, Jerzy Tomczuk
Editor: Halina Prugar
Associate Editor: Maria Kalicinska
Art Directors: Allan Starski, Maria Lubelska-Chrolowska
Set Decorators: Maria Osiecka-Kuminek, Magdalena Dipont
Costumes: Wieslawa Starska, Anna Wlodarczyk
Make-up: Halina Ber, Grazyna Dabrowska
Music: Jerzy Derfl, Wojciech Mylynarski
Sound Recording: Piotr Zawadzki, Malgorzata Lewandowska
Cast
Zbigniew Zapasiewicz (Jerzy Michalowski)
Ewa Dalkowska (Ewa Michalowska)
Andrzej Seweryn (Jacek Rosciszewski)
Krystyna Janda (Agata)
Emilia Krakowska (Dr Wanda Jackowicz)
Roman Wilhelmi (Bronski)
Kazimierz Kaczor (editor-in-chief)
Iga Mayer (Ewa’s mother)
Aleksandra Jasienska (Ola Michalowska)
Marta Salinger (Kookie Michalowska)
Stefania Iwinska (housekeeper)
Halina Golanka (Ewa’s sister)
Jerzy Stuhr (Ewa’s lawyer)
Maria Teresa Wójcik (Jerzy’s lawyer)
Danuta Balicka-Satanowicz (judge)
Jolanta Kozak-Sutowicz (Stenia)
Zygmunt Kestowicz (features editor)
T. Andrzejewski, K. Banman, T. Gandera, Z. Grusznic, J. Kaluski, W. Kapitulka, Krzysztof Kiersznowski, H. Kulina, M. Kula, W. Lothe-Stanislawska, R. Labedz, M. Miarczynska, M. Maciejewski, Stanislaw Michalski, Andrzej Mrowiec, W. Nieciegewicz, I. Olejnik, Witold Pyrkosz, B. Szymkowski, T. Stockinger, Boguslaw Sobczuk, Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Grzegorz Wons, W. Wysocki, Krystyna Wolanska, Krzysztof Zalewski, Tomasz Zygadlo
Poland 1978
130 mins
Digital (restoration)
Restored by Yakumama
The screening on Mon 9 Mar will be introduced by film critic and scholar Michał Oleszczyk
With thanks to
Marlena Łukasiak, Michał Oleszczyk, Jędrzej Sabliński
Presented with the ICA and Ciné Lumière, who will also be hosting screenings of Wajda’s works in February and March
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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