Leaving Her Oppressed Past Behind : Agnieszka Holland takes on issues of authority with ‘Washington Square.’

Director Agnieszka Holland acts as if she’s glad to be here. She’s hamming it up for a photographer in Washington Square Park, posing in front of a pair of oblivious college students, chasing pigeons, asking directions from a cop.

The irony is everywhere you look, if you care to look for it. A victim of political repression in her native Poland and Czechoslovakia, Holland is cavorting across a space where anything goes.

As director of the movie “Washington Square,” adapted from the Henry James novel of the same name, she stands in a place James would never recognize.

“Americans only started recently to be interested by the past,” Holland says in English notable for its convoluted syntax. “The concept of society was today and the future. And you don’t really have the tradition except the western, which is a very particular kind of historical treatment.”

Asked if she could make a western, Holland replies dryly, “I don’t think so. I think it would be too bizarre. The best westerns for me were made by Sergio Leone.”

Until recently Holland has specialized in movies about displacement, reflecting her own displaced history. “Washington Square,” starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Albert Finney, Maggie Smith and Ben Chaplin, doesn’t exactly fit this scheme, although it does deal with issues of authority, another subject Holland is an expert on.

In the story, which was previously (and much differently) filmed by William Wyler in 1949 as “The Heiress,” Leigh plays a charmless heiress who is caught between two men: her overbearing father (Finney) and a fortune-hunting suitor (Chaplin).

“I remember her talking to me about the attraction she had to a woman who grew up at a time where men dominated American society,” producer Roger Birnbaum says of Holland, who might not seem like the first choice to direct an American period (mid-1800s) piece. “Aggie comes from a society where you can’t do anything without somebody’s permission.”

“I think that’s certainly part of it,” says Julie Bergman Sender, another producer on the project. “I also think she was interested in this woman who is challenged by both her father and her lover and who has to make a very definitive choice about how she wants to live her life. And she can either wallow in self-pity or decide that somehow there’s a way to come out the other side. That dilemma is very interesting to most women and I think particularly to Agnieszka.”

In some ways Birnbaum and Sender are imposing what they know of Holland’s life on her decision making. They can be forgiven. Holland’s father, a Jewish Communist journalist (her mother is Catholic and worked for the underground during World War II), was arrested in 1961 and either was pushed or fell out of a window while in custody. It’s never been resolved, not even now that records from that period have been made public.

“I read the protocol of the investigation,” Holland says in measured tones. “It means I followed the last three days of the life of my father. Very strange, very disturbing. I had the impression of very vivid communication with him, and I didn’t know exactly in which way he did suffer.”

Aside from the obvious emotional loss, Holland paid for her association with her father when she was blacklisted from attending film school in Lodz. She was accepted in Prague, where she became caught up in the unrest and brief period of relative freedom known as the Prague Spring. This involvement eventually earned her six weeks in a Czech jail.

Returning to Poland in 1971, she started working for the country’s leading director, Andrzej Wajda, collaborating on scripts with him (“Man of Marble,” “Danton”) before eventually directing a few projects herself. In 1981, while she was in Sweden, martial law was declared in Poland and she became an exile, settling in France. Clearly these dislocations have informed her subsequent work--and impressed some in Hollywood.

“She’s really amazing,” Birnbaum says. “She has lived a very tough life, a life that most of us don’t even come close to, and because she’s gone through this very difficult life, she’s wise. I admire her greatly.”

In 1985 Holland produced “Angry Harvest,” about a working-class Polish farmer who shelters and enters into a sexual relationship with an upper-class Jewish refugee. It was nominated for a best foreign language Oscar.

In 1991 she broke through commercially with “Europa, Europa,” the true story of a Jewish youth who masquerades as a Hitler Youth. This amazing--and to some people offensive--premise was made more so when the youth is continually jeopardized by his one true signifier: his circumcised penis.

“Olivier, Olivier,” released the following year, continued Holland’s delirious inquiries into displacement and identity. This time, a young boy disappears on an errand, only to reappear years later as a Parisian street prostitute. Or does he? As these films suggest, Holland is nothing if not confrontational--and controversial.

“I think I will always be because I’m expressing myself not always the way people expect me to,” she says. “Unfortunately the society by the end of the century starts to get extremely conformist and very afraid of different approaches and difficult questions and unpleasant realities.”

Her success in the United States and elsewhere has made Holland something of a sage in Poland. But in spite of her willingness to address almost any issue--the inertia of the French, anti-Semitism in Poland, American Jews turning a blind eye to the Holocaust during the war--she is through with politics onscreen, at least for now.

“I’m not too interested,” she says. “It’s too complicated and stupid, the politics. Prince Charles is interesting because it’s such a Shakespearean psychology, but the politics today as a people and a character are flat and dull.”

In 1993 Holland made a benign version of the children’s story “The Secret Garden,” which, incidentally, was her first studio picture. She has a very pragmatic view of Hollywood. She’ll take its money as long as she and the suits can agree on the movie she wants to make.

She says she had no problem with Disney on “Washington Square,” aside from the fact that initially executives were concerned that it might be “too subtle.” Screenings seemed to put their minds at ease. She is not unaware that “Washington Square” is not their normal fare.

“It was a little caprice for them, probably,” Holland says. “I watched some studios suddenly take a rational decision to make something which is so far away from their mainstream occupation, and mostly it happens around Oscars, when suddenly they see the nominations only for the makeup and special effects.”

Holland has a daughter, Kasia, who’s in the business, currently working as a storyboard artist for Jonathan Demme. (Holland’s husband is a theater director in Poland.) She may one day direct, which Holland agrees is easier to do now than it once was. But then she comes up with another of her difficult questions, her unpleasant truths.

“The market is very open, but you can see with the Sundance Film Festival, which became so successful, is killing independent American production,” she says. “All these kids who did one OK movie are immediately tempted and grabbed by the studios. It’s interesting to watch their second and third movies, which are mostly very mediocre. Before they learn who they are and how to protect their own identity they are already in the system.”

That’s one problem Holland will never have.