Polish Yoke

By RICHARD CORLISS

MOONLIGHTING Directed and Written by Jerzy Skolimowski

How many Polish guys does it take to make a terrific movie? Four in front of the camera and one behind.

Nowak (Jeremy Irons) is a master electrician from Warsaw, come to London with three laborers to renovate the Kensington home of a wealthy Pole. For a month's hard work the laborers will be paid a year's hard currency. The men will toil in isolation, separated from their families, the outside world and, increasingly, Nowak. He has decided it must be that way: it is December 1981, when, unknown to the three laborers, the Polish government has imposed martial law.

Only Nowak speaks English; only he realizes the pressure that must be exerted to finish the job. And so he drives the laborers beyond their endurance. He steals food, then rations it. He intercepts calls and news from home "for their own good." He quarantines them from entertainment, and even from attending church. It takes no Soviet censor to find a political metaphor here: Nowak is the Polish statesman--Gierek or Kania or Jaruzelski--who must act the ruthless boss to satisfy his own ruthless boss. It is difficult, it is wrong, but it must be done to survive. Thus does the liberal turn totalitarian.

Outside the Kensington house is a Britain in social twilight. The sun is setting on this pinchpenny welfare state; what follows is a long night of petty anarchy. Ironies and animosities collide everywhere: on a quiet street, a cat defiantly arches its back at a small dog leashed by its owner, even as the local lads shout, "Go back to Poland!" at the uncomprehending laborers. At an intersection, fenders graze and tempers flare. In a supermarket, a woman in a fur coat filches consumer goods the Poles could neither find nor afford back home. (Her thievery gives Nowak the inspiration for his own shopping scam.) A derelict steals Nowak's food and saves him from being apprehended with it. London, the dowager queen putting her gaudiest remnants on fire sale, seems so different from Warsaw. But the enforced meanness of its spirit makes the displaced Poles feel almost at home.

In most "message" movies, the true ideological enemy is nuance. Plot is reduced to polemic; characters become walking placards of good or evil; emotional shading is obscured by stolid or hammy acting; the mise en scene angles each shot like a schoolroom pointer. Moonlighting undercuts the genre's stylistic totalitarianism with deadpan comedy, and reveals its message through vignettes, moods, gestures, faces. Jeremy Irons' dour, handsome face suggests the first strokes of a political cartoon from an East European underground newspaper. Nowak is the story's narrator, its star and its sensibility, and Skolimowski challenges the viewer both to sympathize with the hopelessness of Nowak's situation and to judge his complicity in it--to be Nowak and to see him clearly. Irons, the obsessive puppy of The French Lieutenant's Woman and the genteel twit of Brideshead Revisited, rises to his own new challenge. His performance is an anxious, splendidly controlled congeries of intelligence and feeling.

In his earlier films (Barrier, Hands Up, The Shout), Skolimowski has sometimes been too ready to sacrifice social feeling for a quicksilver cinematic intelligence. Moonlighting has its share of incongruous images (a flowerpot Nowak discovers in a toilet bowl) and gorgeous ones (a sweetly comic Degas overtone as one of the laborers reposes in a bathtub), but every shot is there to serve, heighten, reveal. The mundane and the surreal are one: Nowak sees images of his beloved, perhaps unfaithful wife Anna in a store window, on TV, naked in a cellar apartment. She is the vision-memory of all the hopes and fears he left behind, and brought with him to a strange land. Skolimowski left his native Poland in 1981; now he has turned headlines into a sly, affecting parable of Ordinary Bolshevism.

-- By Richard Corliss

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