ARTS
Poles apart
Peter Ackroyd
Rough Treatment ('AA', Camden Plaza) Since this is a Polish film, it becomes interesting almost by accident; so great is the power of the cinema, and so worthless the news 'media', that we turn to the screen in order to understand the world. Rough Treatment teaches us several lessons about Poland: first, Polish dentists smoke in their surgeries, a thing forbidden in noncommunist countries; second, the horror of Polish television — at one point, old ladies are tied together with rope, in front of the camera, and forced to dance on rollerskates — how evil communism can be; and, third, the by now evident fact that the Poles spend most of their time discussing anything and everything with a ferocity which borders upon hysteria. This is not a happy country.
Despite these formidable social problems, however, Rough Treatment never becomes boring or meretricious. The story, for one thing, is interesting: a Polish journalist, played here by Zbigniew Zapasiewicz (whose name we have not encountered before), has reached the top of his profession — principally by being 'the man on the spot' during various revolutions — only to find that his position is being assailed in both private and public ways. His Wife has left him for a young radical, while at the same time the circumambient state has begun slowly to withdraw his privileges — one of them being a regular copy of Newsweek, which can hardly be a 'perk' in any other country. Eventually, in a piece of telling symbolism, the journalist is killed by an exploding boiler.
Recounting the plot in this pedestrian fashion, I'm reminded of a remark in a television comedy. A woman is invited to see a foreign film. 'With subtitles?' she asks. 'Yes, with subtitles. 'If! wanted to read,' she replies with an appropriate look of scorn, 'I would go to a library.' There is, in fact, an air of the library about Rough Treatment, in the sense that it has a literary, or at least novelistic, grasp of emphasis and climax. There are a great many pauses, close-ups, even flash-backs; it has the feeling of being 'well made', as though it could be arranged into a number of chapters without losing anything in the transition.
But the familiarity of the film's structure In no way detracts from its effectiveness: in a plain frame, after all, a picture stands out more clearly and more certainly. In Rough Treatment the picture is of an individual Who suffers from the illusion that he understands the world, when in fact he is blind to the nature and meaning of even his own experience. He wants to suffer the impress of events 'without anaesthetic' — the actual title of the film, when translated from Polish — but the pain, in the end, is too unexpected and too raw. And yet, somehow, this blind and obstinate man turns into the hero of the film: it is a remarkable transformation, and can only be understood within the context of Polish society.
His wife, after their separation, calls him a 'liberal'; she says it with disgust, although that is a measure of her own foolishness. One can, sometimes, know a man by his enemies and, in this case, the enemies are peculiarly obnoxious ones. Ranged against this 'liberal' are the apparatchiks of state socialism, and the reformists or 'radicals'. And here we get a sense of the Polish situation — the 'radical' in Rough Treatment is a self-serving, priggish, opinionated bore. One imagines that there are many Polish radicals and intellectuals of this kind, working in KOR and elsewhere, on the whole lapsed Catholics pushing their country towards the catastrophe they both long for and fear.
In such a situation, the 'liberal' jour nalist cannot win. His is the fate of any true individual during a revolution — he becomes unimportant; the values which he represents are superfluous at best, and at worst damaging to those whose sense of certainty precludes scepticism. The 'rough treatment' meted out to him is the treatment which 'history' and its abettors hand out to those who do not pay them homage. As a lawyer says to him, 'It has been my experience that anything can be proved against any one of us'.
This is, then, a film of argument and analysis. Characters are always discussing the state of Poland, the state of literature; the state of their marriage, and with such intensity that the audience overhears, rather than hears, what is being said. But this doesn't matter: the development of the central theme carries its own conviction, and the acting throughout is excellent, remaining so close to the texture of ordinary emotional life that the larger statements of the film gain an otherwise elusive credibility. It is too easy to turn Poland into a melodrama in three acts, but Rough Treatment avoids' sentimentality of that sort. Here are the lives of embattled peopie, penned within limits which they cannot see but which they always feel.
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