This book is about my times, my formation and generation. It is narrated from the viewpoint of someone in whom there is something of Piszczyk - the unforgettable protagonist of 'Zezowate szczęście' / 'Bad Luck', something of the confessions of Felix Krull, something of that strangely fake spirit of an era in which real buffoons run rife. That's today's Poland. Poland is independent and democratic but born of those times, those contacts and entanglements, those emotions and determination, those careers and that moral decay. The book is irritating, exasperating, provocative. There's no cult of the national flag, no mythologization of Solidarity or 'exploitation' of John Paul II for the Polish cause, no cult of St. Faustyna which - as one Kraków politician thinks - will develop rapidly because it responds to contemporary mystical needs and can help promote Poland around the world. Janusz Anderman bursts the bubbles of our mythology with surgical precision, insightfully describing how 'the art of skimming through' became a component of everyday existence.
The main character of Anderman's book - and of the film based upon it, Janusz Morgenstern's Mniejsze zło / The Lesser Evil - is a writer who managed to get a poem published in the "Nowy Wyraz" monthly in the late 1970s. This was enough to make him a recognized writer whose name started to appear in state-run media. The writer takes full advantage of his privileges - he flirts with the communist authorities, sympathizes with the opposition, and drops out of university as well. He is saved from being conscripted into the army by an excitable female essayist whose sister heads a ward at the psychiatric hospital in Tworki. In the asylum the writer meets a schizophrenic who is writing a novel. When the man commits suicide, the writer takes the rough copy and publishes the novel outside the communist censorship system under his own name, gaining renown, fame, and money. Then comes August 1980. The writer gets involved in trade-union activity. When they ask him to write a radio show for a foreign station, he steals a text rejected years before by Polish Radio. After martial law is declared, he gets involved in opposition activity. Arrested by the secret police, he is sent to prison...
This is where Morgenstern ends his film, suggesting the young writer has done penance for his sins. Anderman, meanwhile, continued the man's story, following the "art of skimming through" Michnik mentioned, which guaranteed him a comfortable life founded on cunning and conformism, both in the tough 1980s and after 1989. Michnik's essay has a bitter tone: though Anderman's protagonist is a writer, his way of life as portrayed in the novel was widespread in those days and practised by many circles, not just artistic ones. The reason was the pathology of the system at the time and the resultant dual thinking typical for the period. Dual thinking made communist party members criticize the Catholic Church but have their children baptized in secret. In his characteristically scathing way, Anderman sets out to prove that attitudes popular in the 1970s survive in present-day Poland and even affect people to whom we owe the political transformation of the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. In this, he doesn't limit himself only to public and political activity, he also writes about interpersonal relations, including the most intimate kind, and family relationships as well. Anderman's hero remains immature in every area, an eternal teenager who doesn't even try to measure up to reality.
This was the material Janusz Morgenstern faced. The elderly director (b. 1922) found it fascinating enough to warrant his return behind the camera after a nine-year hiatus. The way he's made it, The Lesser Evil is a film with huge potential, in which the hero's initially immature actions are pushed to the background. Probably the most important thing in the film is the portrayal of Polish reality at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, showing the deep changes Polish mentality went through thanks to the emergence of Solidarity, but above all, painting an in-depth picture of Polish society in those times. The portrait is realistic, although - from the perspective of time - certainly shocking. The shock is a measure of the film's success but also of social progress: 20-30 years in the history of a nation is not such a long time, but the road the Poles have travelled in that time seems very long indeed.
Morgenstern's film was made with great care. Apart from its experienced director and no less respected producer, the project involves well-known and popular actors, with Lesław Żurek in the leading role, Janusz Gajos and Anna Romantowska as his parents, Borys Szyc as his friend, and a whole group of other great actors. The director of photography is Andrzej Ramlau, the music was composed by Michał Lorenc, and the 1970s and 1980s world was re-created on set by Andrzej Haliński.
- Mniejsze zło / The Lesser Evil, Poland 2009. Director: Janusz Morgenstern, screenplay: Janusz Anderman, Janusz Morgenstern based on Janusz Anderman's novel Cały czas / The Whole Time, cinematography: Andrzej Ramlau, music: Michał Lorenc, set design: Andrzej Haliński, costumes: Magdalena Biedrzycka, editing: Elżbieta Kurkowska, sound: Andrzej Bohdanowicz, Jacek Kamela. Cast: Lesław Żurek (Kamil Nowak), Anna Romantowska (Kamil's mother), Janusz Gajos (Kamil's father), Wojciech Pszoniak (patient), Magdalena Cielecka (actress), Tamara Arciuch (doctor), Borys Szyc (Mareczek), Edyta Olszówka (essayist), Władysław Kowalski (feature writer), Julia Kamińska (poet). Production: SF Perspektywa - Vision Film - Documentary and Feature Film Studio (WFDiF). Co-financed by: Polish Film Institute. Distribution: Vision. Length: 108 min. Released on 23 October 2009.
Author: Konrad J. Zarębski, August 2009.