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| Walesa: Man of Hope – review | Walesa: Man of Hope – review |
| (2 months later) | |
| At the age of 87, that remarkable Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda has directed a movie with terrific gusto and a first-rate lead performance from Robert Wieckiewicz. It's a full-tilt biopic tribute to the trade-union leader Lech Wałesa, founder of the Solidarity movement: bullish, cantankerous, with an exasperating charm and the gift of the gab. Wałesa's defiance of Poland's Soviet masters removed the very first brick from the Berlin Wall. Famously, Wałesa was the one subversive trade-union leader whom Margaret Thatcher felt able to love: Arthur Scargill did not enjoy the same admiration. | At the age of 87, that remarkable Polish film-maker Andrzej Wajda has directed a movie with terrific gusto and a first-rate lead performance from Robert Wieckiewicz. It's a full-tilt biopic tribute to the trade-union leader Lech Wałesa, founder of the Solidarity movement: bullish, cantankerous, with an exasperating charm and the gift of the gab. Wałesa's defiance of Poland's Soviet masters removed the very first brick from the Berlin Wall. Famously, Wałesa was the one subversive trade-union leader whom Margaret Thatcher felt able to love: Arthur Scargill did not enjoy the same admiration. |
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| Wałesa: Man of Hope is a belated companion piece to his Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981), respectively about a Stakhanovite bricklayer and his son in Poland; it discloses now an unexpected trilogy, and somehow suggests, in retrospect, that the heroic "Man" of those first two films really was Wałesa all along. The almost Napoleonic career of Wałesa looked at the time like a kind of miracle; Wajda sets out to examine how that miracle came about. Wałesa (below) starts as a shipyard electrician, devoted to his young wife Danuta, (Agnieszka Grochowska), and to their growing family, and radicalised by the Gdansk shipyard riot of 1970. Amusingly, Wajda suggests that Wałesa's luxuriant moustache made him famous and recognisable: the anti-Stalin in the cause of freedom. His activism moreover coincided with the sensational arrival of the charismatic new Polish Pope John Paul II; the Catholic Wałesa was a key political beneficiary. It's an invigorating and very enjoyable film from a director who shows no sign of slowing down. | Wałesa: Man of Hope is a belated companion piece to his Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981), respectively about a Stakhanovite bricklayer and his son in Poland; it discloses now an unexpected trilogy, and somehow suggests, in retrospect, that the heroic "Man" of those first two films really was Wałesa all along. The almost Napoleonic career of Wałesa looked at the time like a kind of miracle; Wajda sets out to examine how that miracle came about. Wałesa (below) starts as a shipyard electrician, devoted to his young wife Danuta, (Agnieszka Grochowska), and to their growing family, and radicalised by the Gdansk shipyard riot of 1970. Amusingly, Wajda suggests that Wałesa's luxuriant moustache made him famous and recognisable: the anti-Stalin in the cause of freedom. His activism moreover coincided with the sensational arrival of the charismatic new Polish Pope John Paul II; the Catholic Wałesa was a key political beneficiary. It's an invigorating and very enjoyable film from a director who shows no sign of slowing down. |
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