Through a Glass Darkly

In August 1944 the Home Army in Warsaw rose against the Nazis in hopes of liberating the capital in step with the Soviet military advance. In the events that followed and still breed controversy to this day, the Red Army halted its advance and allowed the Nazis to use their remaining forces to brutally suppress the rising and completely destroy the city. It was only on 17 January 1945 that the Red Army entered Warsaw and installed the provisional pro-Soviet government. – Worldmark Encyclopedia of the Nations (2007)

It carries an air of doom from its very beginning – title cards over Warsaw as a bombed-out wasteland, its burning building faces crumbling into clouds of dust, noiselessly, to tides of bombastic orchestral music. Hell in broad daylight. In the first real shot, the Polish resistance members we will follow for the rest of the film trudge across a hilltop as small silhouettes, then make a fatalistic zig-zag into the foreground of demented rubble and barbed wire which none of them will survive. It is the 56th day of the Uprising. It will end in a week. Most of them will not last a day.

In a 2004 "City Cinematheque" television program discussing the film, the Polish-American guest interviewee says that, although he was born three years after the Warsaw Uprising, he feels as though he can personally recall it, such was its lasting impact on the nation. Perhaps it then does not surprise one to learn that the director Andrzej Wajda was a Polish resistance fighter in the Uprising himself, along with many of the crew, who hid in the same Warsaw sewer tunnels as the characters 12 years prior. The film's cast is not a band of soldiers but more appropriately a cross-section of Poland: combatants and non-combatants, men and women, lovers of varying kinds, even a pianist, five decades before Polanski's.

The remnants of this dishevelled resistance group, realizing they can no longer hold out above-ground, retreat into the sewer, a twisting brick labyrinth from which none of them successfully emerge; all either die or are captured. The pianist eventually goes mad in this inescapable subterranean hell and wanders off into oblivion playing an ocarina, like the lyre-playing Orpheus who cannot lead Eurydice back out of Hades once she has gone there. Wajda understands that Poland is flanked by the Nazis and the Holocaust on one side, and Stalinist Communism on the other, and resolves the situation as hopeless. Earlier in the film, the Polish fighters celebrate disabling an attacking German tank with their last rocket, until two little remote-control tanks emerge from behind its hull, like Russian dolls.

Wajda brings a dirgeful tone to wartime defeat that is inconceivable in North American or English cinema. Even in the few Hollywood war films about defeat, such as John Ford's lousy They Were Expendable (1945), there is a glory in the losers' sacrifice, accompanied by a nod outside of the fiction to an avenging victory that will eventually come. In Kanal there hardly seems to be a Poland left to martyr oneself for. Our sole glimpse into the world outside this struggle is the number of the pianist's wife and daughter dialled on the phone – 4-02-18 – who are taken away by the Germans while the pianist is on the line, frozen in the corner of a besieged apartment. 

Score 3/5.