The Great Movies III

A Year of the Quiet Sun, which won the Golden Lion as the best film at the 1984 Venice Film Festival, was not entered for the Academy Awards, because the Polish government was boycotting the Oscars after a film by Andrzej Wajda, critical of the government, was entered. Zanussi, born 1939, no less critical of the communist regime and (with Komorowska) a strong supporter of the Solidarity movement, succeeded in making films because, as he explains with a quiet smile, "I was diplomatic."

Indeed he ran a Warsaw film studio that used government money to make anti-government films, with disguised messages Poles had no trouble in translating. A close friend of Pope John Paul II, Zanussi filmed the pope's play Our God's Brother in 1997, once again choosing Scott Wilson as the star.

As a producer and mentor, Zanussi helped inspire a new generation of Polish filmmakers, including Krzysztof Kieslowski (Zanussi acted in his Camera Buff) and Agnieszka Holland (she began as his assistant). Together with Wajda, Andrzej Munk, and others, they formed the Cinema of Moral Anxiety, creating a group of films about the dilemma of being a good person in a bad time. Kieslowski's Decalogue, ten hour-long films about ethical dilemmas, is paralleled by Zanussi's Weekend Stories, eight films also about impossible moral situations.

One of the remarkable qualities ofA Year of the Quiet Sun is the way it tells its love story without resorting to the devices of cheap romance. These are two middle-aged people of dignity, who have been through unspeakably painful experiences; at one point, Emilia asks her priest, "Does a person have a right to happiness?"

One answer, which the priest does not think to provide, is that a person must be willing to be happy. This is something Emilia's mother knows, and Ewa Dalkowska is luminous as a dying woman of little sentiment, great humor, and hard realism, who encourages the romance and despairs that her daughter will not act decisively to accept a better future.

I will try to discuss the ending of the film without revealing how the story concludes. It is a fantasy scene that takes place in Monument Valley, where John Ford shot his great Westerns, and indeed the one film that Emilia and her mother mention in the movie is Stagecoach. We learn from Wilson that Zanussi and the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky visited Monument Valley on their way to the Telluride Film Festival in 1983, and indeed I remember them there, Tarkovsky dressed in jeans and cowboy boots, Zanussi as always in dark blue suit and tie.

Both directors vowed to film there someday. Tarkovsky died before he could. Zanussi traveled to the valley with only his cameraman, his two stars, and Wilson's wife, Heavenly, as crew, and they filmed the ending, which is poetic in the way it visualizes the hope of the two lovers while reflecting the poignancy of their fates.

lmost the first thing the samurai sees when he arrives is a dog trotting down the main street with a human hand in its mouth. The town seems deserted until a nervous little busybody darts out and offers to act as an employment service: he'll get the samurai a job as a yojimbo-a bodyguard. The samurai, a large, dusty man with indifference bordering on insolence, listens and does not commit. He wants sake and something to eat.

So opens Yojimbo (1961), Akira Kurosawa's most popular film in Japan. He was deliberately combining the samurai story with the Western, so that the windswept main street could be in any frontier town, the samurai (Toshiro Mifune) could be a gunslinger, and the local characters could have been lifted from John Ford's gallery of supporting actors.

Ironic, that having borrowed from the Western, Kurosawa inspired one: Sergio Leone's A Fisful of Dollars (1964), with Clint Eastwood, is so similar to Yojimbo that homage shades into plagiarism. Even Eastwood's Man With No Name is inspired, perhaps, by the samurai in Yojimbo. Asked his name, the samurai looks out the window, sees a mulberry field, and replies, "Kuwabatake Sanjuro," which means "thirty-year-old mulberry field." He is thirty, and that is a way of saying he has no name.

He also has no job. The opening titles inform us that in 186o, after the collapse of the Tokugawa Dynasty, samurai were left unemployed and wandered the countryside in search of work. We see Sanjuro at a crossroads, throwing a stick into the air and walking in the direction it points. That brings him to the town, to possible employment, and to a situation that differs from Hollywood convention in that the bad guys are not attacking the good guys because there are no good guys: "There is," the critic Donald Richie observes, "almost no one in the whole town who for any conceivable reason is worth saving." It's said Kurosawa's inspiration was Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest, in which a private eye sets one gang against another.