Poles Apart: Murderer vs. Martyr in ‘Priest’

In October of 1984, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, who had become known as the Solidarity priest, was kidnaped in the northern Polish city of Torun, beaten, strangled and thrown into a reservoir on the Wista River. His killers were led by a Polish secret police captain, Grzegorz Piotrowski, who was described as cool and confident throughout the subsequent trial, in which he was sentenced to 25 years. Piotrowski’s two accomplices got terms of 14 and 15 years.

Last December, the sentences were sharply reduced “for humanitarian reasons.” One of the killers will be out of jail in a few months, according to Polish director Agnieszka Holland, who was in France filming a script based on the incident when the sentences were shortened. “He’ll be able to come to our premiere,” Holland said with irony.

“To Kill a Priest,” which completed filming in January, will be distributed by Columbia Pictures this fall.

Although Holland does not see Piotrowski as the villain of “To Kill a Priest,” Ed Harris, who plays the killer, does: “He’s not a good man. He’s a fascist. He’s never excused (in the film). . . . I think what Agnieszka wants to show is the working of this (totalitarian) part of society.”

“To Kill a Priest” stars Christopher Lambert as Popieluszko, although in the film he is called Father Alec (Harris’ character is known as Stefan).

“The film is fiction; at no time did we try to reconstitute the story,” said the Corsican producer, Jean-Pierre Alessandri, who likes to describe it as a chase film, full of action and suspense. “It is a metaphysical thriller,” he said, “with universal appeal because it shows the confrontation of two faiths, capitalism and communism.”

Holland, 39, known in the United States mainly for her West German film “Angry Harvest” (nominated in 1968 for a best foreign language film Oscar), said she had wanted to make a film about the priest’s murder ever since it happened. “I found it difficult to translate in audience terms. Finally the best thing seemed to be to choose the dramatic conflict between the two men.”

Her script, written with Jean-Yves Pitoun, traces the rise of the priest as a charismatic spokesman for the Solidarity labor movement and the corresponding rise in patriotic fervor of his killer, who believes he is working on orders from high in the government to get rid of this turbulent priest. In the film they meet only once, in the murder scene.

“To Kill a Priest” centers on the killer, who is obsessed by the victim. “He is fixated on this priest and the power he has. He is jealous of him,” Harris said. “And the priest doesn’t even know he exists.”

Harris, who prepares for his roles minutely (for “The Right Stuff” he learned the Mercury capsule by heart), studied Marxism and went to Warsaw as preparation for “Priest,” which used French countryside for Poland.

“This film is a leap of faith--you have to accept that you’re in Poland. It helped me to be there, to walk the earth.”

Harris sometimes speaks of his character as he , sometimes as I . “He kills him (the priest) because he has to. Father Popieluszko wants to be a martyr. He puts himself on the line. If I don’t murder him, he doesn’t become a saint,” Harris said.

Unlike Harris, Lambert found his “Poland” on the film set. “The first scene we did, the church scene, there were about 2,500 people in the church and the first five rows were Polish. I can’t see very well without my glasses, but I felt those Poles and the way they were listening and the way they were crying. That’s all you need,” Lambert said.

Lambert said that authenticity will have to come from the director. “The only person who can try to be as close to reality as possible is Agnieszka (the director),” he said.

Holland knows that creating a credible Poland is the key to the film. Her director of photography is a Pole from New York, Adam Holender (“Midnight Cowboy”), and the costumes were designed by Anna Sheppard, a Pole from London who dug around Europe for appropriately well-worn clothes and supervised the smuggling out of 300 Boy Scout uniforms.

“They had to be smuggled because otherwise there would have been too many questions about the script,” she said, adding she didn’t want to submit her script to the Polish government for approval. Polish Coca-Cola bottles were also brought into France.

Holland officially left Poland in 1981. In 1968 she studied film in Prague during the “Prague spring,” when Soviet troops marched into Czechoslovakia. She also worked with directors Krzysztof Zanussi and Andrzej Wajda in Poland. She collaborated with Wajda on the filming of “Danton” in Paris, and she has now applied for a French passport in order to travel freely.

Her film crew is her family--”this kind of family you can find in any country,” she says--and the Poland she brings to the screen will be no less real because some of the people who created it have never seen that country. “It is like a marriage between people from different countries,” she said. “You have to invent a language to share your lives.”