Word: nowak
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Nowak (Jeremy Irons), a young Pole, arrives in London from Warsaw in December, 1981, accompanied by three workers. Sent by a rather shadowy figure ("the Boss"), presumably high-placed in the political elite, the four men come to London for a month to privately renovate one of the Boss's townhouses...
...only one of the four to speak English and to be educated. Nowak stands apart from the rest of the group. Their only link to the outside world while they're in England. Nowak becomes the defacto leader. Throughout the film, the workers speak among themselves in Polish. Skolimkowski has wisely refrained from using subtitles, interpolating instead a spare, running monologue by Nowak. Through this technique, his interior state and isolation become almost palpable...
...like a slightly arrogant animal trainer. His comment about the British--"I can speak their language--this is why the Boss sent me--but I don't know what they really mean"--equally applies to his relationship with the workers. As they first enter the empty house. Nowak slowly sets up his own order: "I made it clear to them, no smoking. I hate the smell of cigarettes," he says...
...angles each shot like a schoolroom pointer. Moonlighting undercuts the genre's stylistic totalitarianism with deadpan comedy, and reveals its message through vignettes, moods, gestures, faces. Jeremy Irons' dour, handsome face suggests the first strokes of a political cartoon from an East European underground newspaper. Nowak is the story's narrator, its star and its sensibility, and Skolimowski challenges the viewer both to sympathize with the hopelessness of Nowak's situation and to judge his complicity in it-to be Nowak and to see him clearly. Irons, the obsessive puppy of The French Lieutenant...
...earlier films (Barrier, Hands Up, The Shout), Skolimowski has sometimes been too ready to sacrifice social feeling for a quicksilver cinematic intelligence. Moonlighting has its share of incongruous images (a flowerpot Nowak discovers in a toilet bowl) and gorgeous ones (a sweetly comic Degas overtone as one of the laborers reposes in a bathtub), but every shot is there to serve, heighten, reveal. The mundane and the surreal are one: Nowak sees images of his beloved, perhaps unfaithful wife Anna in a store window, on TV, naked in a cellar apartment. She is the vision-memory of all the hopes...