The vagaries of international distribution have significantly delayed Katyn’s release on these shores; the film was issued in its native country back in June 2007. That’s a long time in movie years, a unit that takes significantly more toll than its canine equivalent. But it cannot be accounted for by want of profile. Katyn, the work of veteran director Andrzej Wajda, has sold millions of tickets, picked up dozens of awards and a Best Foreign Language Picture nom at the Oscars. It has, moreover, been A Huge Deal, particularly in its country of origins, where the events it depicts retain a raw relevance.
The Katyn massacre, a mass execution of Polish POW officers and citizens ordered by the Stalin in 1940, was, until comparatively recently, denied by Soviet authorities, who, throughout the history of the union, pointed the finger at the Nazis. But almost two decades after Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the Soviet NKVD were responsible for the murders, Mr. Wajda’s film still feels taboo, like something one should not dwell upon or even see.
The director plays the crime for maximum grisliness, though long before the final atrocities, there is the horror of helplessness, of civilians sandwiched between German and Russian troops in Kraków, of terrible events happening faster than anyone can process. The structure skips across characters and chronology accordingly. In the aftermath of WW2, a young widow (Maja Ostaszewska) seeks news of her husband Andrzej (Artur Zmijewski), a Polish cavalry captain. His terrible fate is revealed through a diary and flashbacks, but not before we see the consequences; a post-war society divided into clear factions; those who cannot rest and those who simply wish to get on with things, a straight, if painful toss-up between justice and pragmatism.
Katyn is on the side of the righteous, which is to say, everybody from the sympathetic Russian Major Popov (Sergei Garmash) to the tragic child who mistakes a prisoner for her father.
The performances are excellent, the scope is expansive and the denouement, despite an extensive lead-in period, is utterly shocking. As with previous work, Mr. Wajda deftly utilises archive footage without disrupting the narrative stream and jumps from macro to micro with ease. One gets the sense that the great director has been working up to this terrible beautiful monument since 1954, when his feature debut, A Generation, visited similar historical themes. Katyn is both national and personal cinema – the 82-year-old filmmaker’s own father who was one of the victims – and a very public mourning.