After. You once asked what they were doing in room 101. I said you know that. Everyone knows that. Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.
This quote from George Orwell’s novel 1984 begins the film Zgoda, which means “consent” in Russian. We find the main characters in the turning point for Polish history in 1945.
However, there were many such turning points in its history, because according to a very subtle observation of one of the historians, Poland is a frontline country, on the territory of which some cataclysms constantly occurred. So in 1945, after the end of hostilities on its territory during the Second World War, its troubles did not end.
Under political pressure and the military presence of the Soviet Union, a local communist regime was established. In the first place, people of German descent who bear collective responsibility for the time of National Socialism and its crimes fell under repression.
In the center of the story are disenfranchised prisoners Erwin and Anna and their mutual friend Franek, who is in love with Anna, who serves as a guard in a camp for German prisoners. Anna is in love with Erwin.
Directed by Maciej Sobieschanski, the script by Malgorzaty Sobieschansk presents the story of Franek, Erwin and Anna (a particularly unremarkable work of young Polish actors) in the frame of a disintegrating gray, sullen world, in which hatred, humiliation and disbelief reign.
Here it is impossible to be aloof from what is happening and like a murky and viscous quagmire, the reality of everything that is happening around drags Franek, and with him Anna to the bottom.
In the film there are no bright colors, no sunny lyrical episodes, only half-darkness and dimmed light. And sometimes there is a feeling that on the screen the reality in the refracted consciousness of the characters of the film, or in general it happens in some purgatory, which is located among the countless bulk heaps, past which Franek passes every day.
The film is unlikely to be interesting outside Poland, as the nerve of this chamber story is in the old wounds of Polish history.
My opinion is not bad.
6 out of 10