Cinema
Korczak ('PG', Curzon Phoenix) London Film Festival (Selected cinemas)
A secular sainthood
Hilary Mantel If I were an ambitious young film-maker I would be hoping to skip over national classifications; but the 34th London Film Festival has divided its programme on geographical lines. Categories include Brit- ish Cinema, Africa, Asia and Latin Amer- ica; there is a 'Hong Kong Focus' and a section of American Independents. France gets a section to itself, and then there is World Panorama, a sort of no man's land in which the Bulgarian shall lie down with the Dane and the Australian with the Pole. No doubt as the festival progresses other possibilities for categorisation will occur. Most ordinary film-goers, I imagine, use categories: Hollywood/non-Hollywood, and subtitled/non-subtitled. We all have our foibles and, of course, before ventur- ing into the cinema I have to check carefully whether the film is Robin Williams/non-Robin Williams; beside this vital distinction, national origin is as no- thing to me.
As in previous years, the festival has an excellent and ambitious programme. The bigger commercial releases are showing in and around Leicester Square. The opening film is Texasville; Peter Bogdanovich directs Cybill Shepherd and Jeff Bridges in a story of small-town life 20 years on from The Last Picture Show. Stephen Frears' film The Grifters marries, we are promised, pulp fiction and Greek tragedy. The festiv- al's closing film is Bertolucci's The Shelter- ing Sky, an adaptation of the Paul Bowles novel set in North Africa. It has a good deal of advance publicity to live up to.
The highlight of the British section will be Mike Leigh's Life is Sweet; among the French films, I am especially looking for- ward to Cyrano de Bergerac with Depar- dieu in the leading role. The Italian section is particularly strong. Two notable films are set in Palermo — Francesco Rosi's To Forget Palermo and Marco Risi's Street Boys. Giuseppe Tornatore, who made the popular Cinema Paradiso, has a new film called Everybody's Fine; Marcello Mas- troianni plays a septuagenarian leaving Sicily for the first time in his life to visit his sons on the mainland. If I had to choose one from this section it would be Night Sun, adapted from a Tolstoy story and directed by the brilliant Taviani brothers. Please see the Arts Diary for booking information.
Meanwhile, if you can go to see Andrzej Wajda's Korczak you will be rewarded by a central performance which may well be unmatched by anything in the festival or by anything else this year. Wojtek Pszoniak played a frozen and strangely elderly Robespierre in Wajda's 1982 film, Danton. The nature of his role did not allow him to command the screen in that film as Depar- dieu did. Now comes a role more suited to his remarkable energies but, sadly, the film itself is not Wajda's best.
Janusz Korczak was a Polish Jew, born in 1878. He founded an orphanage in Warsaw and, when the Nazis created the Warsaw ghetto, he struggled to care for 200 children in a climate of deprivation and fear. His admirers offered him many chances to escape, but he chose to stay with his children as they were transported to Treblinka, and to die with them there.
He is a kind of secular saint, and as complicated as saints usually are. The film brings out the difficult and compromising nature of the choices Korczak had to make. Wajda has shot it in an austere black and white, with sparing use of contempor- ary footage. The tone is uneasy; some scenes are strikingly successful, while others fail because they are too static or because the script lets them down. But Pszoniak holds it together. He never settles for a retreat into dignity, but reminds us scene by scene how uncomfortable it can be to be in the presence of a great idealist. As he acts, you hold your breath.
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