Portrait of an artist
Final film by Polish master Andrzej Wajda is an earnest, if contrived, tribute to politically defiant avant-garde painter
Polish master Andrzej Wajda died in October, at age 90, making this his last film. It’s a fitting, if underwhelming farewell. A stylistically staid movie about a politically defiant avant-garde artist, the least one can say about Afterimage (Powidoki) is that its heart is in the right place.
We first see Wladyslaw Strzeminski (Boguslaw Linda) through the wide eyes of Hanna (Zofia Wichlacz), a fresh-faced female student at the High School of Visual Arts in Lodz, which the painter helped found.
He is missing an arm and a leg — consequences of his time in the army during the First World War — but rather than wallow in self-pity, he introduces himself to his new pupil by rolling down a grassy hill, laughing. Then, with the rest of his class hanging on his every word, he launches into a speech on the ideals of abstract art and the concept alluded to in the film’s title.
It all feels a little stagy and, unfortunately, that impression never fades over the ensuing 90 minutes. We are shown how Strzeminski stood up to the Stalinist orthodoxy overtaking Poland, in the late 1940s: he refused to abide by demands that art confine itself to the codes of Socialist Realism, and he paid the price. While we watch his acts of defiance play out, we don’t feel their dramatic power. Nor do we
get a true sense of what drove his art.
Instead, we get a plodding, if well-intentioned, narrative that hits all the right points but never really takes flight. We meet Strzeminski’s precocious teenage daughter Nika (Bronislawa Zamachowska), who drops in from time to time when not tending to her ill mother — the sculptor Katarzyna Kobro, never shown in the film; and we see him become incrementally stripped of his social standing, artistic credentials and means of subsistence.
Afterimage is not particularly noteworthy as a cinematic experience unto itself. However, as an earnest adieu from an acclaimed filmmaker with some 50 titles to his credit, it’s entirely honourable.