Word: nowak
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first, the work proceeds smoothly. With the men busy knocking down walls and building new ones. Nowak exercises a firm yet detached control over them. An amusingly ironic scene comes early on, when the men pay their first visit to the rather seedy local supermarket. Their eyes light up responding to the seeming utopia and their hands push the empty shopping carts with clumsy eagerness. The suspicious glances of the shoppers and salespeople, the sudden arrest of a shoplifter the clicking video cameras at every aisle--all combine into a grosteque echo of a totalitarian state...
...when attempting to call his wife Anna. Nowak finds out from the tinny operator's voice that all lines to Poland have been cut, because of a "military coup" (i.e. martial law.) Later, he first sees pictures of the military tank and checkpoints through the window of a television rental store, where all the sets are tuned to the same station. This startling, almost surreal image of history fragmented into ghostly slivers of flickering light illuminates the protagonist only distantly...
...Since Nowak is the only one who can read and listen to English news, the other workers have no idea of what is happening. In a scene which more than any other typifies Nowak's aloofness and isolation, he goes down to tell them of the news. When he arrives, they are sneaking a drag on a cigarette in a shadowy room. Consequently, he fails on his mission: "All I could say was, who smoked...
Never appearing to reflect on the situation in Poland. Nowak only says. "I must concentrate on work. I must drive them harder." His apolitical and self-centered character severs him from the pulse of his homeland, and ironically, from England too. In the opening scene at the airport, the heretofore businesslike passport checkers inquisitively asks him if he belongs to Solidarity. He replies a hurried "no," commenting ironically. "That was the only true answer I gave...
...film then fluidly portrays the deterioration in Nowak's and his coworkers' position in the British society. The renovation stumbles across innumerable difficulties, the storekeepers and neighbors grow considerably colder to the workers, and the money starts running out, with little hope of obtaining any more. In a black-market-like situation. Nowak unexpectedly begins shoplifting to keep his workers pacified and fed. Then by using the incentive of extra food to drive them harder, he assumes an increasingly authoritarian role. Especially telling is the way in which Nowak channels and fundamentally alters the worker's reality, much like...