The spiritual ill-being of the well-fed world Zanussi’s little-known television film The Contract was created by him as a satirical comedy directed against both the “red” and the Western bourgeoisie, but the characters of the picture are so disgusting and do not cause the slightest sympathy that it is very difficult and unpleasant to watch it. Of the films of recent years, most likely, Winterberg’s “The Triumph” most resembles “The Contract”, but surrounds it on all fronts: Zanussi could not create a fascinating narrative, memorable types, to overcome the primitive tasks of social criticism, except for which there is nothing in the “Contract”. The “celebration” hit the viewer on the head with the inside of bourgeois prosperity, everything was mounted, directed and played at the highest level. In the same tape, Zanussi tows the plot, in the script there are no “percussion” scenes, the characters are uninteresting and small.
In terms of the degree of disgust of the types, The Contract resembles Altman’s Wedding, with which there are even scripted roll-calls, but if Altman is a master of mosaic storytelling, where each episode is equivalent to the whole, then Zanussi has two storylines, then overlapping, then diverging, then sagging. Sometimes he doesn't know what to do with them. And only the image of Peter with his final rebellion fits into the theme of the cinema of “moral anxiety”, evoking in the memory of the heroes of “Protective flowers”, “Spirals”, “Scar” and “Without anesthesia”, but this line is not developed and abandoned by the director to the mercy of fate.
“The Contract” is worth watching only for two reasons: first, to see an episode of Zanussi’s evolution from his early chamber dramas (“Family Life”, “Illumination”) to late socio-critical canvases (“Heart on the Palm”, “Foreign Body”); second, to understand what the “red bourgeoisie” is – the most disgusting phenomenon of the well-fed philistinism of the late scoop. The left now prefers not to talk about it, forgetting that it was its winglessness and duplicity that buried socialism all over the world. There are many non-obvious symbols in The Contract: for example, in the finale, when guests ride horses in the night with noise and songs, while their house burns and a fire truck with a siren rushes towards them. What is this, if not an elegant hint of the spiritual ill-being of the well-fed world?!
Zanussi was always an artist of an awakened conscience, that is, one who reminded not only that life in the socialist camp is almost indistinguishable from bourgeois life in the West: the same philistineism, the same pragmatism, the same lack of spirituality. As Zanussi shows in The Contract, behind the facade of the bravura construction of socialism lies careerism, philism, consumer psychology (our parents will tell us how they chased things in the scoop!). Of course, communist ideology – itself cannibalistic, based on class hatred and envy, but the fanatics who believe in it – at least serve ideals, however wrong, but ideals. The philistines, who were the majority under socialism, believed in nothing but their belly, purse and Czech coat.
The “Contract” is not capable of surprising anyone today in the era of unbridled luxury of the bourgeoisie, in the era of unabashed economic exploitation: it is now so popular that the “red bourgeoisie” look beggars against this background. However, Zanussi is a Christian, and it is no coincidence that it is the young Catholic in the “Contract” that rebels against the surrounding pigeonhole: Christian ideals, which sought to destroy communism and which capitalism despises, turn out to be the only beacon in the world of total variability and spiritual prostitution for the director and his faithful viewer. And unlike many of his colleagues, this conclusion in Zanussi looks convincing and organic, which justifies the unsuccessful “Contract” in the eyes of a discerning sinophile.