I wonder, you that voted low on this movie, what is it that you dont like about it?
shareI have no idea, voted 10/10.
sharethe translation for this movie is abysmal in my opinion. If you are not a fluent speaker of polish and go only by subtitles then this movie can be very misleading.
i speak polish rather fluently and found this hard to follow. Cinematography is stunning but it was very hard to follow the story in detail.
To be honest,
for all people of Poland and of polish roots, it's without doubt a 10/10.
it's the writer Adam Mickiewicz, the Polish Romantic poet par excellence
and Andrzej Wajda - one of the great post-war directors of central Europe.
And the film is about a small country's struggle to become independent.
I'm not polish, I thought the film was a worthwhile watch
- but it's not a 10 by me, more like 7.5/10
Wajda has made better movies before.
The film was a little too superficial and too bombastic in it's patriotism
and there were some unbearable over-acting by some characters in it.
Maybe to provide a comical effect in the serious business of Poland's history.
But the end result is confusing.
.
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This is typical style of Andrzej Wajda' directing and his way of describing polish characters so I rather like it in this movie.
It is, in fact, also Mickiewicz's way of describing many of his characters (I've started comparing it to Jane Austen - not because the story would be similar, but because the way the characters are treated, with a bit of tongue-in-cheek, is similar), so I really like it here.
And I'm not even Polish. I'm Czech. Loved the film, read the book, kept returning, consider the book one of my absolute favourites, sometimes name it as *the* favourite.
But it's true that it's very much a Polish thing on the whole and doesn't have much to offer anyone else, at least on the surface (my literature teacher sold it as a variation on the Romeo and Juliet theme, which is so not up to snuff when you actually know the book). The local cinema, back when I first saw the film, just had barely enough viewers to make it worthwhile. Thankfully, around that time my sister had just started being interested in the Baltic countries, so she took note and took us to see it.
"There is Robinson, alone on a deserted island - but they will marry."
That is a pretty apt description of the whole country of Poland, alas. Wajda's films are usually a chore to sit through.
shareI concur with another poster- the problem is it's too local. I have seen nearly all of Wajda's films, and once interviewed him for Variety newspaper in the 1980s. He is among the all-time greatest directors, and has over a dozen classics in his resume -films that played all over the world and resonated with disparate movie audiences.
But PAN TADEUSZ is obviously aimed squarely at a commercial Polish audience. It is in the vein of a Jerzy Hoffman film -no offense, I saw THE DELUGE in 1976 in Cleveland, where it was imported strictly for our local Polish audience, not as a foreign art film with subtitles. These films serve a purpose -the Austrian films with Romy Schneider as SISSI are analogous.
For an artist like Wajda to do such a film is fine with me, but it does not live up to the universality and let's face it, the artistry, of his international films. As an artist he should (and usually did!) bring alive an ancient time and an unusual culture for the viewer. But to appreciate PAN TADEUSZ I would need to consult several history books -the film was confusing because it assumed so much that a Pole would know and that I did not. And its many longueurs, where Daniel Obrychski and others would have endless debates, were not realized cinematically -again a misstep the classic Wajda films never made.
"Three quarters of what is said here can be completely discounted as the raving of imbeciles" - Donald Wolfit in Blood of the Vampire (1958)