Cinema
Party time
Peter Ackroyd
The Contract ('AA', Gate Camden)
he film opens with a horse galloping 1 out of control; one smiles wryly and jots down a phrase, 'horse = Poland?' It is a terrible habit, but one has grown accustom- ed to looking for symbols in the Polish cinema; their films would not be the same without them. The Contract is directed by Krzysztof Zanussi, his second to be shown in England during the last six months. It was made during the 'Polish spring', but if you imagine that you will discover within it some statement about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, you're going to get a shock. The Contract does not celebrate `liberation' at all: quite the opposite. It sug- gests that even when people are free they destroy themselves; that when people have 'ideals' they may have them for quite the wrong reasons. Zanussi, however, turns these political and social matters into the material of comedy, which is why he is more subversive than a KOR dissident or a CIA spy. And he certainly does not glamourise, or sentimentalise, his nation. It emerges, instead, as rather a pain in the neck. The audience came to weep and they were forced to laugh instead.
The theme is a familiar one, and is based in part upon Robert Altman's The Wed- ding. The children of two affluent Polish families are about to marry, and the film is about the desperate attempts to celebrate that fact. The father of the groom has a lux- urious villa somewhere in a forest, to which a number of relatives and dignitaries have been invited. Of course it all goes dis- astrously wrong: the bride runs frantically out of the church before the exchange of vows, and the party turns into a wake. Cer- tain guests lock themselves in the bathroom while fights break out by the buffet; wealth has never looked more seedy as middle- aged men circle each other and ask for of- ficial favours, continually reckoning up power and status as if they were either warders or inmates in the same prison. The groom smashes a large window and then passes out, and there's a thief stealing money and papal medallions from ladies' handbags. Everyone is either gloomy or sar- donic, and they mutter ritual greetings with pale lips. I suppose that, even in 1980, they had a lot on their minds.
Zanussi is an artist of the understate- ment; he works with a number of small, disparate scenes which do not, until the
end, form a complete statement. But the in- cident of the theft may help establish the tone of the film. As soon as the valuables begin mysteriously to disappear, the guests get into a terrible state. Should they ques- tion the domestic staff first, or proceed alphabetically? Small vigilante groups are formed, young men thrown against walls, rooms ransacked. Everyone becomes hysterical until it is discovered that one of the foreign -guests, a French danseuse (played brilliantly here by Leslie Caron) is responsible. Then they all rush downstairs and get drunk, the incident quite forgotten. What are we meant to feel about this? Is the rather desperate and vindictive behaviour of the Poles to be blamed on the insidious presence of a foreigner? Or do they get into a mess anyway, without any help from their friends? Do they, in fact, rather enjoy get- ting into a mess?
It is typical of Zanussi's method that he should raise such questions, and then move on without staying for an answer. His stance is, characteristically, a neutral one in the sense that he does not search for any ob- vious or easy moral. He brings a group of people together, and allow5 a number of things to happen at once, only indirectly suggesting a perspective from which we might understand what we see. The young people in the film, for example, are quite ghastly. The bridegroom, who 'has always been against deals and compromises' in the past, agonises over the possibility of a free flat which his father offers him; he cannot come to terms with his ambivalence and, in the end, burns the house down. His bride is so ruthlessly idealistic in her attitudes that she bores everyone in sight. Together they have about as much life as a Polish sausage and it is quite clear that Zanussi is not par- ticularly interested in them or in their pro- blems, except when their 'solutions' destroy or injure the lives of others. It might be fan- ciful to think of Solidarity in this context, but Zanussi does not actively exclude the comparison.
But it is when he portrays the older generation that his talent for comedy comes properly to life. These people have used 'the system' — they are as 'corrupt', in that sense, as a journalist in London or a Marx- ist academic in Paris — and Zanussi treats them mockingly on one level, but also with a curious affection on another. It became clear from his previous film, The Constant Factor, that he has at best an ambiguous at- titude towards idealists and revolutionaries: they are destructive of more than they know. His imaginative sympathy ties with those who have in a sense traded in their in- nocence: they are more complex and substantial figures in his films. They are touched with melancholy, and their bravura is only skin-deep.
Leslie Caron, as the French relative, brings a little glamour and vivacity into this somewhat gloomy gathering, just as her English daughter, a bad-tempered and randy nymphette, adds a little life to a re- pressed and repressive party. Here, again, one is unsure about Zanussi's intentions, but the effect of these contrasts is to present the Poles themselves as both more self- destructive and morose than their foreign companions; they are forced under the yoke of their national characteristics like oxen going to the slaughter.
After the son has tried to burn down his father's house, the guests are patheticallY grateful when the policemen and firemen arrive, douse the flames, and send the son into a mental hospital. The young men stand around in their great-coats, stamping the ground and blowing on their fingers; they look uncannily like the Polish soldiers whom we have seen recently upon our television screens. Foresight on Zanussi's part? Perhaps: an artist is sometimes wiser than he knows. But since this is in large measure a comedy, judgment is suspended in face of that absurd and unknowable ele- ment in human. affairs which causes laughter. 'The house hasn't completely burned down!' the father calls out to his shaken guests, 'Let's have a drink!' Of course the policemen refuse to join the par- ty: they are on duty.
At the close of the film the boring bride walks morosely through the silent, glittering wood with the groom's mother. 'Mess everywhere. Inside us. Around us ...I don't even know what we're getting at'. And that's it. One can put the notebook away, and forget about the symbol of the galloping horse. Zanussi, probably, doesn't know what he's getting at, either. He has presented us with a number of damaged lives, and watched the comedy of their association. After the conflagration, they all go inside for another little drink. As said earlier, Zanussi is perhaps the most subversive of all Polish artists.
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