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Andrzej Wajda
A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents (1986)

Despite infuriating the Polish authorities with Man of Iron (1981), which openly supported Gdansk shipyard worker Lech Wałęsa and the Solidarity trade union, Andrzej Wajda avoided the incarceratory fate of several fellow filmmakers. Moreover, even though he was removed as head of the Unit X production studio, he was allowed to travel to France to make Danton (1983), with Gérard Depardieu. Yet while this French Revolutionary biopic and the wartime melodrama A Love in Germany (1983) contained allegorical references to the situation back home, Wajda felt guilty at working as normal while his countrymen were experiencing the hardships of 19 months of martial law, which had been imposed by General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1981.

Wajda's exile had a deleterious impact upon both his career and his mentality: “The martial law was a dramatic event for me which I deeply deplore,” he later recalled. “It unsettled me at the time when I was on my best form. It created a horrifying emptiness which I could not easily penetrate.” Thus, on his return to Poland, Wajda sought a refuge in which he could rediscover himself and he found it in a Romeo and Juliet story by Tadeusz Konwicki (who would take a cameo role in the film as a mysterious stranger whose periodic appearances are designed to rouse the naive hero from his blinkered indifference to the cruel realities about to erupt around him). Set in the balmy days of August 1939, A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents referenced such earlier Wajda outings as Ashes and Diamonds (1957), Lotna (1959) and The Young Ladies of Wilko (1979) and yearned nostalgically for a time when Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Jews defied totalitarianism to live together in an uneasy harmony.

A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents

Returning to his idyllic country home before he enrols at university, Piotr Wawrzynczak knows little about the political situation that concerns friends Dariusz Dobkowski and Jaroslaw Gruda, who fear that their German and Russian homelands will soon be at war. He is also bashful when chic siblings Joanna Szczepkowska and Gabriela Kownacka discuss sex during a picnic and he even fails to notice that Dobkowski's younger sister, Bernadetta Machela, has a crush on him. Yet when he falls head over heels in love with Paulina Mlynarska, he is willing to face the wrath of her bullying cousin and gun-toting father by conducting a secret wedding ceremony on the banks of a sun-kissed river.

Desperate to show that certain causes are worth fighting for, even in the face of insurmountable odds, Wajda wanted to pay tribute to those who had challenged the Communist hegemony by comparing them to the famous 13th Regiment of Vilnius Uhlans, whose mounted charges against Nazi Panzers had proved as heroically futile as Solidarity's tilt at the Warsaw Pact. However, with bureaucrats already withholding permission to film in the authentic Lithuanian locations, the army was also forbidden to co-operate with the project. But when Wajda arrived in Boguslawice to shoot the cavalry sequences, he was greeted by 300 horseback volunteers in full ceremonial dress. So, even though he feared ostracisation for leaving Poland at the height of a crisis, his paean to lost innocence had captured the national mood and he continued to propagate silent revolution on screen until Wałęsa was democratically elected president in 1990.

Next: Louis Malle and Au Revoir les Enfants (1987)

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Andrzej Wajda
A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents (1986)

Despite infuriating the Polish authorities with Man of Iron (1981), which openly supported Gdansk shipyard worker Lech Wałęsa and the Solidarity trade union, Andrzej Wajda avoided the incarceratory fate of several fellow filmmakers. Moreover, even though he was removed as head of the Unit X production studio, he was allowed to travel to France to make Danton (1983), with Gérard Depardieu. Yet while this French Revolutionary biopic and the wartime melodrama A Love in Germany (1983) contained allegorical references to the situation back home, Wajda felt guilty at working as normal while his countrymen were experiencing the hardships of 19 months of martial law, which had been imposed by General Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1981.

Wajda's exile had a deleterious impact upon both his career and his mentality: “The martial law was a dramatic event for me which I deeply deplore,” he later recalled. “It unsettled me at the time when I was on my best form. It created a horrifying emptiness which I could not easily penetrate.” Thus, on his return to Poland, Wajda sought a refuge in which he could rediscover himself and he found it in a Romeo and Juliet story by Tadeusz Konwicki (who would take a cameo role in the film as a mysterious stranger whose periodic appearances are designed to rouse the naive hero from his blinkered indifference to the cruel realities about to erupt around him). Set in the balmy days of August 1939, A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents referenced such earlier Wajda outings as Ashes and Diamonds (1957), Lotna (1959) and The Young Ladies of Wilko (1979) and yearned nostalgically for a time when Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Jews defied totalitarianism to live together in an uneasy harmony.

A Chronicle of Amorous Incidents

Returning to his idyllic country home before he enrols at university, Piotr Wawrzynczak knows little about the political situation that concerns friends Dariusz Dobkowski and Jaroslaw Gruda, who fear that their German and Russian homelands will soon be at war. He is also bashful when chic siblings Joanna Szczepkowska and Gabriela Kownacka discuss sex during a picnic and he even fails to notice that Dobkowski's younger sister, Bernadetta Machela, has a crush on him. Yet when he falls head over heels in love with Paulina Mlynarska, he is willing to face the wrath of her bullying cousin and gun-toting father by conducting a secret wedding ceremony on the banks of a sun-kissed river.

Desperate to show that certain causes are worth fighting for, even in the face of insurmountable odds, Wajda wanted to pay tribute to those who had challenged the Communist hegemony by comparing them to the famous 13th Regiment of Vilnius Uhlans, whose mounted charges against Nazi Panzers had proved as heroically futile as Solidarity's tilt at the Warsaw Pact. However, with bureaucrats already withholding permission to film in the authentic Lithuanian locations, the army was also forbidden to co-operate with the project. But when Wajda arrived in Boguslawice to shoot the cavalry sequences, he was greeted by 300 horseback volunteers in full ceremonial dress. So, even though he feared ostracisation for leaving Poland at the height of a crisis, his paean to lost innocence had captured the national mood and he continued to propagate silent revolution on screen until Wałęsa was democratically elected president in 1990.

Next: Louis Malle and Au Revoir les Enfants (1987)

Louis Malle

Louis Malle
Au Revoir les Enfants (1987)

Ever since he had witnessed three Jewish boys being led away by the Gestapo from his Catholic school in Fontainebleau, Louis Malle had wanted to tell their story. Indeed, he dated his desire to become a filmmaker from that moment in 1944. Yet it was only after the poor reception accorded Crackers (1984) and Alamo Bay (1985) that he decided to end a decade-long sojourn in the United States and return home to make what many consider to be his masterpiece.

Back at his boarding school after the Christmas holidays, Gaspard Manesse is riled because newcomer Raphael Fejtö poses a threat to his status as the brightest boy in the class. He hears a rumour that Fejtö and two other new boys are Jewish and asks older brother Stanislas Carré de Malberg what this means and why headmaster Philippe Morier-Genoud would have risked taking them in when the town is crawling with German soldiers. After their initial antipathy, Manesse and Fejtö become inseparable. But their friendship is ended by the treachery of François Negret, a lame kitchen skivvy who is envious of the wealthier students he once supplied with cigarettes and black market goods in return for the food parcels they received from home.

Malle had caused a stir in 1974 when his study of a collaborationist teenager, Lacombe, Lucien, had outraged those intent on obfuscating the dark deeds and divisions that had occurred during the Vichy era. Consequently, he had found it difficult to raise funds for his potentially contentious memoir. But the arrest of Klaus Barbie (“the Butcher of Lyon”), reopened the debate and made Malle all the more determined to expose the perniciousness of anti-Semitism at a time when Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right Front National party was growing in popularity.

Au Revoir les enfants is far from being autobiographical propaganda, however, as Malle was careful to show the Jewish boys being taunted by classmates and quislings alike, as well as being succoured by both soldiers and priests. He also refused to palliate the initial tensions between his “I” character and the outsider and based their academic rivalry on his own with a boy named Bloom four decades earlier. However, this insistence on authenticity rather backfired, as Malle was frequently asked during Q&A sessions whether he had actually betrayed his friend with a nervous backward glance like the one he depicted. 

The inclusion of this involuntary gesture suggests the lingering of impotent regret rather than suppressed guilt. But Malle was never good at hiding his emotions on screen and in choosing Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant (1917) as the movie shown to the students as a treat, he lets slip a subconscious and somewhat astringent comment on his period in exile, as the America it presents is hardly the land of opportunity or the home of the free. No one seemed to notice, however, as Malle's screenplay was nominated for an Oscar and the film was cited in the Best Foreign-Language category. But while Au Revoir les enfants facilitated Malle's rehabilitation in France, he only completed one more feature on home soil (Milou en Mai, 1990) and only two more in the remaining five years of his life. Perhaps was finally paying the price for the honesty that had characterised his career, for as he once admitted: “My ambition is not strictly to entertain. I am always interested in an aspect of the truth which goes against preconceived ideas, including mine.”

Next: Bernardo Bertolucci and Stealing Beauty (1996)

Bernardo Bertolucci

Bernardo Bertolucci
Stealing Beauty (1996)

Bernardo Bertolucci left Italy following the release of The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), as he felt it was impossible to work in a climate of corruption. Consequently, he spent the next 15 years in China, North Africa and Bhutan making the “Oriental trilogy” of The Last Emperor (1987), The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Little Buddha (1993). However, the mani pulite (“clean hands”) trials of the early 1990s exposed the Tangentopoli (“Bribeville”) culture at the heart of the establishment and convinced him that Italy was finally capable of change. But Bertolucci, who had been based primarily in London since marrying British screenwriter Clare Peploe in 1990, now felt like a stranger in his homeland. Therefore, he decided to collaborate with American novelist Susan Minot on a story that cast the spirit of the ultimate literate exile, Henry James, in a contemporary setting.

Still coming to terms with the suicide of her poet mother, 19 year-old Liv Tyler comes to stay with aunt Sinead Cusack at the Tuscan villa she shares with sculptor husband Donal McCann. Tyler never knew her biological father, but she is convinced from hints in her mother's writings that she was conceived in this cradle of the Renaissance and tries to ascertain whether McCann, dying author Jeremy Irons or ex-soldier Carlo Cecchi was responsible. Troubled by her own virginity, Tyler also harbours fond memories of her first kiss four years earlier with wealthy lothario Roberto Zibetti. But, now in full bloom, she also attracts the attention of American entertainment lawyer D.W. Moffett (who is dating her cousin, Rachel Weisz) and shy local, Ignazio Oliva.

Stealing Beauty

“Like me,” Bertolucci confessed, “the people who make up this cosmopolitan community had been very politically engaged twenty or thirty years previously; but, out of despair, they decided to abandon their political dreams at a certain moment and seek refuge far from the vulgar crowd, at the top of a hill.” But unlike Luis Buñuel in The Exterminating Angel (1962), Bertolucci follows Jean Renoir in La Règle du Jeu (1939) in extending compassion towards house guests who either recall figures from his own past (poet father Attilio Bertolucci and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini) or his earlier pictures (The Spider's Strategem, 1970 and La Luna, 1979). He even references his cinematic mentor, Jean-Luc Godard, in the use of on-screen text, as the naïve Tyler struggles to express her emotions in verse.

Carping critics suggested that Bertolucci had abandoned his aspiration to become the next David Lean by producing what they dubbed “First Tango in Tuscany.” But while Darius Khondji's camera captures the glory of the Sienese locations, this is anything but a work of calligraphism. Indeed, there's something subversive about visuals that owe more to the Fauvists than the Old Masters who had once drawn inspiration from the same hills and even the soporific mood of the Chekhovian enclave is disturbed by a couple of screaming jet fighters, a giant satellite aerial and some migrant hookers, whose intrusion into the idyll clearly imply the director's prodigal disgust at the direction that Italy had elected to take in his absence.

Next: Paul Verhoeven and Black Book (2006)

Paul Verhoeven

Paul Verhoeven
Black Book (2006)

Having quit The Netherlands to escape critical censure and accusations of misogyny, Paul Verhoeven returned two decades later because he had reached a similar impasse in Hollywood. Reluctant to specialise in sci-fi, but with his options limited by the collapse of independent studios like Orion, Verhoeven spent six years seeking a suitable subject. Ultimately, he returned to the wartime setting that had already inspired the documentary Portrait of Anton Adriaan Mussert (1968), the feature Soldier of Orange (1977) and the teleplay All Things Pass (1979), and resurrected a story about the Dutch treatment of both Jews and quislings that he and writing partner Gerard Soeteman had researched many years before.

However, with its decent villains and duplicitous heroes, Black Book owes much more to Vehoeven's time in Hollywood than Holland, as it follows the fortunes of Carice van Houten, a Jewish jazz singer who survives an ambush by fanatical Nazi Waldemar Kobus and becomes the lover of Gestapo chief Sebastian Koch in order to glean information for a resistance cell lead by businessman Derek De Lint and doctor Thom Hoffman. However, she is framed as a collaborator and has to endure the opprobrium of her newly emancipated neighbours before striving to start afresh on a kibbutz by the Sea of Galilee.

Black Book

Born in 1938, Verhoeven was raised a mile from the site of a V-2 launch pad near The Hague. He later recalled that “it was like big special effects in the sky.” But Verhoeven also knew all about Jews being betrayed for 10 guilders a time, political prisoners being killed in reprisal for underground activity and collaborationists being brutalised following the liberation. Curious as to why Dutch resistance began so late in the war and why such a high percentage of Dutch Jews perished, he wanted to focus on a character who was in grave danger during the conflict, yet faced even greater peril with the coming of peace. He also sought an answer to the question, “When is an ordinary Jew more important than a good Dutchman?” – and it's intriguing that this line was not translated in the subtitles when it was uttered during the film.

Although some denounced the picture for being “superficial, perverted and decadent” and more indebted to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) than Fons Rademakers's Oscar winner, The Assault (1986), Verhoeven rooted Black Book in fact. The benevolent SS officer, the lawyer and the doctor were all based on real people, while Rachel Stein was a composite of three women connected with the resistance in Rotterdam and The Hague. However, there was also an allegorical element relating to the War Against Terror and one of Verhoeven's main motives for returning to Europe was the certainty that Hollywood would have toned down the more controversial aspects of the action (including a waterboarding sequence) in order to avoid confrontation with the Bush White House. Ultimately, however, the film fell between mainstream and arthouse stools and failed to find much favor with audiences on either side of the Atlantic. Undeterred, Verhoeven returned to Hollywood, still keen to make his much-cherished life of Christ, but settling, in the interim, for a story about a couple who discover that the surrogate they have hired to carry their baby is insane.

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