Leave No Traces

?eby nie by?o ?ladów

VERDICT: An exacting faithfulness to period detail doesn’t quite save this fact-based drama set in 1983 Poland from feeling overstretched and bogged down by repetitive scenes.

The first shot of Leave No Traces may make you think you’re at a retrospective of one of the great Polish filmmakers from forty or more years ago, so perfect is the recreation. It takes place in a shadowy Warsaw bedroom in 1983, and the stillness, warm tonalities and welcome texture (the film appears to have been shot on 16mm) are uncannily similar to something Andrzej Wajda would have made in that era. Given director Jan P. Matuszy?ski’s previous foray into period detail with The Last Family, the attention paid to ensuring scenes look exactly right is no surprise. More unexpected is the film’s unwieldiness and inordinate length, which notwithstanding its competition berth in Venice and selection as Poland’s Oscar entry next year, will thwart wide play.

Thematically it also fits into the Wajda-era, when the Solidarity movement was generating international headlines and the government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski crushed dissents despite the revocation of martial law. Based on an investigative exposé detailing the brutal killing of a young man in custody and the massive cover-up orchestrated by the nomenklatura, the film exhaustively details each secret meeting, each procedural incident and yet oddly neglects developing character, thereby making the two-hour, forty-minute running time feel even longer.

That static opening shot cuts to an energetic hand-held sequence, resulting in an unexpected shift from a classical image to one more loose-limbed and contemporary, cleverly informing the viewer that, while true to the period, Matuszy?ski is very much a director of today. The location is the apartment of poet Barbara Przemyk (Sandra Korzeniak), whose son Grzegorz (Mateusz Górski) is horsing around with his friend Jurek (Tomasz Zi?tek). It’s finals time, and Grzegorz’s excitement as he thinks about going to university spills out in a bit of rough housing in Warsaw’s old town. Suddenly military cops appear and haul them both to the station where they proceed to beat Grzegorz mercilessly when he says he’s not required to show them i.d. Jurek tries to help but is held back as the men pummel his friend with truncheons and then viciously kick his limp body once an officer advises they concentrate on the stomach so as to leave no traces.

Having satisfied their sadistic needs, the cops put him in a broken-down ambulance and send him off to a psych hospital, claiming he’s strung out on drugs. Jurek frantically follows and then alerts Barbara, who takes her son home but the next day he dies, his organs so badly damaged from the pounding he received that the doctors are amazed at the extent of his internal injuries. As the sole witness, Jurek is potentially a target, so Barbara arranges for him to go into hiding for a short time, but once the BBC gets wind of the story (in a very stilted scene) and the massive funeral receives international attention, it’s considered safe for him to resume his life.

Jaruzelski’s henchmen, led by General Czes?aw Kiszczak (Robert Wi?ckiewicz) order a campaign to discredit the dead boy, his mother and especially Jurek, digging up any information they can use to tar the scared yet defiant young man, including his sexual relationship with Barbara. Highly skilled at finding everyone’s weak spots, the secret service realize that Jurek’s conservative parents Tadeusz (Jacek Braciak) and Grazyna Popiel (Agnieszka Grochowska) are ripe for exploitation, so they find ways to turn their fears against their son. What follows is a chilling assault on the emotional ties binding friends and family, using a variety of methods to break down family structure. Since they’ve already forced one of the ambulance drivers into a false confession, all that remains is to cast doubt on Jurek’s story once the show trial begins.

Matuszy?ski reveals the degree of intimidation in painstaking detail, but he includes so many similar scenes, for example of bugging the Popiel home, or meetings between the General and his underlings, that they lose their power to chill. By the end we know very little of Jurek’s personality or hopes apart from getting justice for his friend, and at a certain point it feels like the script betrays itself with an unexplained change in Barbara’s determination. Comparisons will inevitably be made with The Lives of Others or some of the excellent films set in Latin American dictatorships, the best of which succeed so well because they invest in emotional relationships as well as show the terrifying military and legal juggernaut used to destroy lives. Leave No Traces also isn’t done any favors by the characterization of the lead prosecutor, a middle-aged blonde with turquoise eyeshadow whose archness and perpetual tipsiness, though we never see her drink, calls to mind some SNL sketches.

The production and costume design are however flawless, and the muted colors reproduce to an exacting degree the look of Polish films of the era. Kacper Fertacz’s cinematography is influenced but not beholden to that kind of period authenticity, though it seems overly constrained by a sobriety in conference scenes contrasted with too many shots of Jurek running. Given the excellent use of songs in The Last Family, it’s a surprise that here the music works too hard, its long, low resonant notes working against modulation.

 

Director: Jan P. Matuszy?ski
Screenplay: Kaja Krawczyk-Wnuk, based on the book Leave no traces. The Case of Grzegorz Przemyk by Cezary ?azarewicz Cast: Tomasz Zi?tek, Sandra Korzeniak, Jacek Braciak, Agnieszka Grochowska, Mateusz Górski, Robert Wi?ckiewicz, Tomasz Kot, Sebastian Pawlak, Tomasz Dedek.
Producers: Leszek Bodzak, Aneta Hickinbotham
Co-producers: Patrice Nezan, Laurent Versini, Mikula? Novotny, Olivier Père, Rémi Burah,
Ma?gorzata Seck, Alicja Gancarz, Magdalena Ulejczyk, Anna Spisz.
Cinematography: Kacper Fertacz Production design: Pawe? Jarz?bski
Costume design: Ma?gorzata Zacharska
Editing: Przemys?aw Chru?cielewski
Music: Ibrahim Maalouf
Sound: Cyprien Vidal, Kacper Habisiak
Production companies: Aurum Film (Poland), Les Contes Modernes (France), Canal Polska (Poland), Background Films (Czech Republic)
World sales: New Europe Film Sales
Venue: Venice Film Festival (competition)
In Polish
160 minutes