Provincial Actors

A theatre company in a provincial town rehearses Wyspiański's Liberation with a celebrated director down from Warsaw. The actors think they are seeing the chance of their lives. The director bends the text to his own reading, and what emerges is a production nobody believes in. The same collapse continues at home: every conversation between the lead actor and his wife turns into a fight. The film is not interested in theatre. It is interested in the everyday form of submission: everyone does what the person above them says and nobody does the work they want. That the play is called Liberation is its bitterest joke. The form is cramped and realist: small flats, backstage, the rehearsal room, handheld camera. The dialogue constantly overlaps. It is Agnieszka Holland's first feature. The film counts among the strongest examples of the Polish cinema of moral anxiety and, under censorship, states the country's condition through allegory rather than directly. It won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes in 1980. Tadeusz Huk plays the actor and Halina Łabonarska his wife. Who it is for: viewers who like Polish cinema and stories told from inside the theatre. Who it is not for: anyone without the context. The allegory leans on the politics of the period, and without that you are watching bad-tempered people.