Warsaw '44 (2014)
Directed by Jan Komasa

Film Review

With its uncompromising visuals and brazenly raw depiction of young resistance fighters coming to terms with the starkest horrors of war Warsaw 44 (aka Warsaw 1944 and Miasto 44) is surely one of the most authentic and memorable war films to have been made in the last fifty years.  It is certainly one of the most relentlessly shocking.  Made to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, it was written and directed with monumental verve and commitment by Jan Komasa, whose primary motivation was to raise global awareness of one of the most significant events in Polish history.  The 33-year-old multi-award winning filmmaker had already come to national and international prominence through his first box office hit, Suicide Room (2011), and Warsaw Uprising (2014), a remarkable feature-length documentary on the same subject as his subsequent epic war film.

Warsaw 44 is a jaw-droppingly graphic tour de force - a worthy tribute to those who fought and died against overwhelming odds in the 1944 uprising, only just preventing the total annihilation of a great European city by the most ruthless killing machine the world has ever known.  The uprising (termed Operation Tempest) lasted 63 days, with the Polish resistance army putting up a solitary battle against the occupying Nazis as the Allied Forces and Red Army steadfastly refused to get involved - with the result that virtually the entire city was razed to the ground and most of its population wiped out in just over two months.  Warsaw 44 was a torturous labour of love for its young director and took over eight years to complete after the script was drafted in 2006.  The effort that Komasa lavished on the film is apparent in its extraordinary attention to historical detail and fearless attempts to convey the true horror of modern warfare as authentically as possible.  Watching this grim spectacle of death and defiance is a truly shell-shocking ordeal - but this is probably the only way that any of us today can gain a true sense of the scale of suffering experienced by those caught up in Warsaw's last battle against Nazi tyranny.

Earlier on in his career, Jan Komasa won praise for his work on music videos and this dalliance with pop culture impinges on Warsaw 44 in ways that are both strange and wonderful.  When the fighting finally gets underway (after a fairly placid build-up focusing on life under Nazi occupation), frenzied bouts of Tarantino-style gory excess come fast and fierce, interspersed with bold - even outrageous - eruptions of kitschy pop stylisation reminiscent of Almodóvar at his most florid.  The most memorable example of this is the scene in which Stefan and his soul mate Ala exchanges kisses in a moment of extreme peril - both are lost in the moment as bullets and blood rain down around them like showers of confetti.  Surreal digressions such as this and an even more bizarre one set in a graveyard fracture the film's brutal realism as dramatically as a sledgehammer smashing into a pane of glass and for a fleeting second the sheer grotesque insanity of warfare is exposed with a blistering clarity.

As the central protagonist Stefan, lead actor Jozef Pawlowsk succinctly captures the naive idealism and muddled bravado of the younger resistance fighters who succumb to the call of duty with the most horrific consequences.  Stefan's idealistic resolve is scarcely matched by his competence and resilience and he soon proves to be a pretty useless champion of liberty.  His sense of helplessness is brought home in a powerful sequence in which, reduced to a catatonic state, he makes his way blindly across a battle-strewn urban hell, like a fly caught up in the most violent of storms.

Stefan's female comrades-in-arms Alicja and Kama are much abler warriors, putting several of their male counterparts to shame with their compassion, heroism and unflagging determination not be beaten.  Through their gutsy performances Zofia Wichlacz and Anna Próchniak serve as potent symbols of a defiant Poland, whilst most of their male cohorts scarcely register as more than mere cannon fodder for Nazi brutality.  Without the presence of these two strong female characters to guide us through this monstrous hellscape, Warsaw 44 would have been an unbearably bleak film.

The film's leisurely first half works admirably to set the context and introduce the principal characters before we are plunged headfirst into a full hour of unrelenting mayhem.  What Jan Komasa subjects us to in the last third of his film is so stark, so unceasingly violent, that it is hard to keep watching right through to the end.  It is an unending apocalyptic carnival of horrors, with death and destruction crashing down on puny ant-like humans in an onslaught of terrifyingly über-biblical proportions.  Roman Polanski's account of Warsaw's destruction in The Pianist (2002) is staggeringly mild in comparison - no visual poetry, just a non-stop catalogue of bone-crushing, flesh-roasting, building toppling doom.

In a characteristically subversive vein, Jan Komasa ends his monolithic film not with a bang but with a Disney-style happy-ever-after coda that serves two contrasting purposes.  On the one hand it celebrates humankind's resilience, our seemingly insuperable ability to recover from any catastrophe and resume our idyllic lives, even after the most appalling detours into insanity.  Humanity's story is, after all, one of survival against the odds; the rest is piffling detail.  On the other (more cynical) hand, Komasa reminds us how easy it is to forget the past, to allow the lessons of history to fade away, forgotten by the descendents of the survivors whose only preoccupation is the here and now.  The traumatic events depicted in Warsaw 44 took place well within one human lifespan and yet already they have been virtually lost to posterity.  The past isn't just another country, it is a place we never knew existed - until someone comes along and tells us about it.

Film Synopsis

By the summer of 1944 Nazi Germany is already losing the war.  Encouraged by the advance of the Red Army from the East, the Polish resistance Home Army (Armia Krajowa) sets in motion an all-out uprising against the occupying Germans.  Many of the resistance fighters are wildly enthusiastic but militarily inexperienced idealists, such as Stefan Zawadzki, a young man from a respectable middleclass family.  Since his father was killed at the start of the war, Stefan has had to take on menial jobs to support his struggling family.  Preparing for combat in the countryside with his comrades in arms, Stefan meets and falls in love with Alicja Saska, a fiercely defiant young woman who is determined to drive the Nazis from her homeland.  Another woman resistance member who arouses his interest is Kama, who acts as an important messenger for the group.

On 1st August, the uprising begins in earnest and Stefan commits himself fully to his cause.  The reaction of the German occupying forces to the unexpected revolt is swift and violent, and mass executions are carried out with ruthless efficiency across the city.  On witnessing the shooting of his mother and younger brother by a German soldier, Stefan instantly falls into a catatonic state, and without Ala's efforts to keep him safe he would surely have perished in the ensuing mayhem that sees most of Warsaw reduced to rubble in a matter of days.  Upon his recovery, Stefan rejoins his comrades and lends his support to save the remnants of his home city from total obliteration by Nazi firepower.  It is a fight that few of Stefan's friends will survive, a bid for freedom which, even if its succeeds, is bound to leave an indelible scar on Warsaw and its few surviving inhabitants...