Pan Tadeusz -- by Spielberg

An aunt has reverently brought it in her bag and given it to me with a warm recommendation. I received it with profuse thanks and deeply held misgivings. The poem (“epic” they like to say in Poland, meaning that it is an Illiad, which it is not, it is a very successful opera buffa in verse) takes approximately 12 hours to read out loud in its entirety, how could one turn it to a two hour film?

But this, the film’s biggest problem, turned out not to be a problem at all: the script writer did a fine job of selecting relevant spoken parts, eliminating the narrator (who has most of the poem’s text) and yet leaving the story’s outline coherent and thus transforming it successfully into a play. But perhaps he still left too much dialogue. Perhaps the full story is still too long for a dramatic work and perhaps that’s why the actors rush breathlessly through the text. But then perhaps they do it for another reason: perhaps they received instructions to speak their lines as if they were prose in order to make it the film more movie-like.

But it doesn’t work. The dialogue rhymes; there is do disguising its rhythm. The truth is that Pan Tadeusz must be declaimed – chanted – in a certain artful/artificial manner, reminiscent of the way the British read Shakespeare (and Americans can’t); which is how it is read on public occasions and how one learns to read it in school. It’s artificial, yes, but artificial can make successful theater: the ultra-artificial Noh is by and large good. It was both – artificial and successful – in the black and white TV production of Pan Tadeusz made in the 1970’s. But this – this seems as if the actors were trying to get rid of the text, spit it out and run away; as if they were embarrassed by it.

Add to that atrocious ham acting; Technicolors; and the non-stop obnoxious soundtrack and you get the picture. With embarrassment I had to admit to myself the disastrous truth that Wajda has lived long enough to turn out perfectly respectable Spielberg.

What a pity.