where sheep
eat wolves
by Douglas Messerli
Zbigniew Kaminski (screenplay),
based on a story by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Andrzej Wajda (director) Panny z Wilka (The Girls of Wilko) /
1979
Wiktor Ruben, who manages a farm
connected to a school for blind girls, has just lost his friend, Jurek.
Standing over the gravesite of a man whom Wiktor describes as
"ordinary" (but whom the priest later reveals as a poet), he falls to
the ground, temporarily fainting. The doctor suggests Wiktor take a few weeks
off by returning to a popular summer spot where he has, before the war,
regularly visited, and where Wiktor's aunt and uncle have a farm.
Wiktor arrives at the neighboring farm,
Wilko, a peacock running ahead of him which he seems to be prodding with a
horse crop. Indeed, what he discovers at Wilko will demand that he control his
pride (which the peacock’s symbolize) as much as possible; for inside the house
sit five sisters, Julcia, Jola, Zosia, Kazia, and Tunia, four of whom he has
known—along with another now-dead sister Fela—from his childhood visits to this
spot. The women have all grown a bit older, and what one can imagine as their
lithe, youthful bodies have rounded out a little, but they are all still quite
glorious beings, the first four now married with children. They are astounded
to see Wiktor after a fifteen-year absence, but it is obvious that they are
also delighted by his return; he is still fit and handsome, and they, it
quickly becomes apparent, were, at one time all in love with him.
"Where is Fela?" Wiktor
wonders. Slowly it dawns on the viewer that her death has been connected to his
departure so many years ago.
Wajda's quiet and sumptuously beautiful film appears, accordingly, to be
headed in the direction of a meditation on past and present, focusing on these
beautiful women, none of whom, apparently, won his heart. Tunia, not of age on
Wiktor's previous visits, is now solicitous of his love. His aunt and uncle
encourage him in that direction, but as his aunt mentions, divorce is always a
possibility in the Wilko house; for the women of Wilko are all unhappy in their
marriages, particularly the eldest, Julcia, whose husband now penuriously controls
the estate. While it is clear that she was once beautiful, in her hairstyle and
dress she now looks quite maidenly, having long ago retreated into her
intellect—and kitchen, where she cans hundreds of jars of jam.
Accordingly, while Tunia, who fondly reminds Wiktor of the dead Fela,
devotedly watches over his comings and goings, each of the daughters attempts
to rekindle her past love and perhaps win him over to her cause. Clearly Wiktor
is attracted to and amused by all these appealing—and sometimes, emotionally,
not-so-appealing—beauties. And Jola, specifically, seems quite ready to fall
into bed with him. Yet, as Dan Schneider has noted in an online review of the
work in 2007, instead of greeting these attentions with joy, Wiktor (Daniel
Olbrychski) "deftly conveys the sense that the character is not in
conscious control of his reactions, with seemingly involuntary twitches and
facial expressions" that, I would further argue, reveal his discomfort in
the various situations. Asked why he never chose any of them for marriage, he
admits he was a "coward."
That has, in turn, led many critics to see the film as a portrait of a
failed man, a man unable to accept the joys of life; Wiktor seems more
comfortable, as he mentions earlier in the film, working; life's pleasures seem
as elusive now as they evidently were in his youth.
As Schneider also astutely points out,
however, the "lambs" of Wilko—who seem so willingly led to sexual
slaughter—live in a world, as one of the sisters describes it, where
"wolves are eaten by the sheep." If the sisters work as a kind of
sexual unit, they also cleverly manipulate the men around them, and as each
secretly vies for Wiktor's love, they employ everything from military-like
maneuvers to various kinds of passive aggression.
In Wiktor, however, unlike their equally unhappy husbands, these
"maidens" have met their match. Despite all their ploys and gestures,
their suicidal threats, he remains aloof, as if, he suggests, he were "a
strange soul from another planet." Accordingly, the past repeats itself,
as Wiktor once more leaves these lovely "girls" of Wilko in the lurch
in order to return to a world of the blind.
Perhaps Kaminski and Wajda were attempting to create just such a shadowy
figure, a man trapped in his own indecision, a being unable to truly engage in
love. But I believe, if one carefully focuses on the earliest scenes of this
film, it becomes quite apparent why Wiktor has chosen none of these
manipulative women for his wife.
The only truly emotional response he demonstrates in this work, one must
remember, is his collapse at the grave of his friend, Jurek, the man he
describes not simply as his best, but
his only friend. Without pinning
Wajda's subtle film to one reading, I would venture to suggest that Wiktor is
gay*, and that the cowardice to which he admits, has little to do his inability
to fall in love with one of the Wilko women, but with his refusal to admit his
love of men. He is, indeed, from another planet, a world outside of the orbit
of these provincial beauties. His world is not so much a world of the
blind—even though he is surrounded by the blind—but of the hidden, faced as he
is by an unnamable love, now forever lost.
*I should
note that nothing in Iwaszkiewicz's original story, nor in Kaminski's script,
for that matter, says anything specific about Wiktor's sexuality. Jurek is
simply described as his "only close friend." The key passage in
Iwaszkiewicz's story begins with Wiktor telling the local doctor of his
relationship with Jurek: "He couldn't sleep at night, he felt very nervous
and he couldn't work at all. And he couldn't stop thinking about his friend who
had died of consumption two months earlier. He told his story casually, but he
couldn't talk about Jurek without emotion. Jurek was the only close friend he
ever had. He was a seminarist, the nephew of the camp's Mother Superior, not an
unusual person, but Christian, quiet and good." The key words here, that
Wiktor “couldn’t sleep at night,” that he “felt very nervous,” that “he
couldn’t stop thinking about his friend,” and that Jurek was his “only friend,”
might, obviously also suggest that Wiktor had simply been moved by Jurek’s
death to ponder his own fate, particularly since he as an extremely isolated individual.
But the combination of these statements suggest something else lying just below
the surface, particularly the description of Jurek being his “only close
friend,” code for a friend with whom one did not simply have causal
relationship.
Shortly after writing the piece above, I sent it to
the author of the script, Zbigniew Kaminski, who, coincidentally,
lives during the summers in my condominium building. Zbigniew wrote that
"Your main argument is absolutely true. Nobody before you discovered
it."
We later met to discuss my publishing the
work in the Green Integer book series, and he explained that Iwaszkiewicz was
gay, although evidently closeted by Polish society.
In late May of 2013 Wajda, after Kaminski
had given him a copy of my first film volume which included the three Wajda
reviews, wrote me personally, thanking me for the essays: “It’s very important
to me that you have become interested in my three movies, and more importantly,
that you were generous enough to include them in the first chapter of your
book, which contains an analysis of the most important works of European
cinema. It is a great honour for me.” He went on to describe that he was
currently working on a film about Walęsa, which he described as “one of the
most difficult movies in my long life, not only because the character on the
screen is alive and been so thoroughly described in my books, but also because
the selection events in his life was not easy.” I was, obviously, quite
delighted by Wajda’s response.
Los Angeles, Valentine's Day, 2009
Reprinted
from Green Integer Blog (February 2009).
Reprinted
from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).
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