bensonj Review of The Promised Land

The Promised Land (1975)

Bravura Film-making of the Highest Order!

[10/10 · 22 January 2006]

Made after THE DAMNED, but before 1900, this operatic-style melodrama, about the industrial revolution in Lodz ca. 1895, is far better than either. Like the other two films, it takes an extreme situation in history and makes it more extreme, piling on the excess. Two examples here: a garden party that's like a Roman orgy, with naked women, tigers in cages, etc., and a scene where a worker grapples with his boss and they fall into a giant machine which instantly spews out their bodies as huge chunks of raw meat. But whereas Visconti, and, particularly, Bertolucci, ultimately drown under their excesses, Wajda maintains total control over his narrative. The characters and their single-minded mission hold the film tightly together, and the visual excesses seem like an inevitable part of the narrative, not sideshow set-pieces. The film is incredibly visceral: the thrill of making a killing on the financial market, the inhuman noise of the factories, the excitement of undercurrents of rumors among patrons at the opera. Most of all there's the brilliant use of relentless, machine-like music throughout that keeps up the unremitting unflagging pace. The film has a power which stays with you long after you've left the theatre! And it's a virtuoso recreation of a time and place. It must have been extremely costly to make. The subject certainly seems safe for an East European-bloc filmmaker--if ever capitalists were villains, it must have been at that time and place. But in fact Wajda was making a politically dangerous statement. The final scene of workers being shot at the order of the owners was an explicit comment on workers being shot in communist Poland a few years before the film was made. This is a great film by one of the greatest filmmakers of the twentieth century!