MOVIE REVIEW : ‘QUIET SUN’: ALL’S UNFAIR IN POSTWAR

There’s a scene in Krzysztof Zanussi’s “A Year of the Quiet Sun” (opening Friday at the Cineplex Beverly Center) where Zanussi and his actors--Scott Wilson and Maja Komorowska--seem to show the exact moment when a man falls in love with a woman: when his mind makes her into someone he cannot live without. As it comes, it’s shocking--perhaps because the cynicism of recent movies dulls your expectations, or perhaps because you recognize it so deeply.

There are no gauzy close-ups, no saccharine cascades of music. Just a simple exchange of looks between Wilson’s Norman, sitting in his military jeep, and Komorowska’s Emilia, standing--tense and vulnerable--in the doorway of a seedy hotel. He’s an American driver for an Army commission investigating war crimes in a 1946 Polish city; she’s a Polish war widow with an elderly, crippled mother.

Neither speaks the other’s language. Each is vulnerable, struggling with the chaos around them. When we see Emilia through Norman’s eyes--this haggard, drawn woman with bagged eyes and sudden flashes of defiance--we see what she’s quickly become to him: precious, indispensable. And when he pulls away into the night, with the halting discretion and tenderness that are hallmarks of his character, we may feel qualms, sense the reasons this love might not best the hell around it.

“A Year of the Quiet Sun” is a great, beautiful and humbling work, a film of majestic compassion. Its conception and execution are thrilling; its actors magnificent. This is the work of a brilliant film maker who sees no reason to flaunt his brilliance--who submerges it in the story’s texture, makes it breathe and pulse with life.

You can only wonder why this marvelous movie--the 1984 Grand Prize winner at the Venice Film Festival--took so long to get a U.S. release. Perhaps, to a harsh eye, the love story seemed overwrought, the postwar background too loaded with “meaning,” the lovers themselves lacking conventional beauty, a pair of losers.

Maybe that’s the rot of seeing too many movie romances: You start to view love as a prize won by the physically perfect. Here, they’re plainer--their wounds opened, stitched, opened again. Around them is a world that seems callous, casually cruel; a world of prying bureaucrats, thieves, whores, the mass graves of pilots, the flotsam and jetsam of the war. There’s a charnel quality in the air, in the gray, empty, blasted streets of the refugee zone--smoky, poisonous (streets that cinematographer Slawomir Idziak imbues with colors both limpid and searing).

Trying to preserve sensitivity here is a sordid joke, doubly so since these lovers can barely talk to each other--are, like lovers in a Frank Borzage or a Nicholas Ray film, truly alone.

Except, of course for Emilia’s mother. In a wonderfully ironic touch, this cranky, invalid woman (played superbly by Hanna Skarzanka) is the most robust and bawdy of the film’s characters, the most alive. The scene where, bathed in sweat, Skarzanka dreams aloud of America, recalling the Monument Valley mountains and cliffs she saw once in “Stagecoach” (an image echoed harrowingly in the film’s last shot), is unforgettable, poignant. Zanussi is one of the world’s great film makers. But, somehow, he’s never gotten his due from American audiences (or, often, critics).

Perhaps his work is too subtle on the one hand, too seemingly conventional on the other. Like John Ford, or Jean Renoir--whose “Grand Illusion” is an obvious influence here--Zanussi is a poetic naturalist concerned with communities. But he’s also an ex-physicist, with a scientist’s precision. Certainly no film maker ever portrayed the milieus of government bureaucracy (“Contract”) or the university (“Camouflage”) with such devastating empathy.

Superficially, “A Year of the Quiet Sun” resembles Zanussi’s most popular export to date, “Ways in the Night” (where the lovers were a German soldier and a Polish aristocrat--also played by Komorowska). But, far from simply reworking that story, he’s carried the premise to a pathos that scalds you: Pity draws the lovers together, pity pulls them apart. The actors seize on the roles with high skill and fervor: Skarzanka; Ewa Dalkowska as the hapless prostitute next door; Zbigniew Zapasiewicz as the devious Szary--and most of all, Wilson and Komorowska.

Scott Wilson (still best remembered as one of the two killers from “In Cold Blood”) can sometimes seem almost too sensitive. But in “Quiet Sun” he has a soft, rapt, tender intensity--few recent actors have opened themselves up so nakedly or fearlessly. And Komorowska--a veteran of Jerzy Grotowski’s famed theater troupe, as well as Zanussi’s films--demonstrates again that she’s one of the great contemporary movie actresses. Her face, worn but radiant, catches every flicker of emotion.

In the world Zanussi shows us in “A Year of the Quiet Sun,” a world ruled by the arbitrary, the brutal, by the winds of history--beauty seems so vagrant or absent that when his lovers reach for it, or dream about it, you ache for them. Yet even that small gesture has heroism: the unrealized dream, the moment of kindness, the touching of hands in a world blanched with hate. It’s Zanussi’s special triumph that he’s able to redeem love from the traps of sentimentality: set it free, make it sing.

‘A YEAR OF THE QUIET SUN’ A Film Polski/Teleculture Inc./Regina Ziegler Film Production. Executive producers Michal Szczerbic, Michael Boehme. Director Krzysztof Zanussi. Script Zanussi. Camera Slawomir Idziak. Music Wojciech Kilar. Editor Marek Denys. With Scott Wilson, Maja Komorowska, Hanna Skarzanka, Ewa Dalkowska.

Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (language, sexual situations).