Guest
Действие фильма разворачивается в период социальных перемен, происшедших после смерти Сталина. На фоне исторических событий показана фигура полного недотёпы: после освобождения из тюрьмы Ян Пищик не может найти себя в изменившейся жизни. Пугливый и лишённый собственных убеждений, он силится оставить о себе хорошее впечатление, но вместо этого создаёт себе плохую репутацию. Born unlucky, a victim of the errors and distortions of Stalinism, he is released in 1956. He meets a politically feverish woman, her influential parents, and finally becomes the father of her child. But bad luck, or perhaps an unlucky era, will not let him forget. This film is a sequel to Munk’s Zezowate Szczescie and it’s much the same, only more so. The film begins in a cinema, where the last scenes of Zezowate Szczescie are being shown. Among the audience is Piszczyk, the “hero“ of that film, and another man who recognises him. The other man follows him out and accosts him. Piszczyk is bitter about the film- it wasn’t really like that, the writer told lies about him and made him look a fool, he should never have talked to him- he tells his companion, who, although- or because- he was the policeman who years before interrogated Piszczyk and got a confession and conviction out of him is someone Piszczyk can talk to. Again- much as in Zezowate Szczescie- Piszczyk tells his story to the only man he can trust, a man who has punished him. Piszczyk is still the same character as before- an opportunist and fantasist redeemed only by incompetence- indeed- the one heroic moment, when he physically cannot give the names of other people in an imaginary conspiracy, even though threatened with death, is treated as farce. This time Piszczyk is mixed up with Stalinist communists and reformist communists and- surprisingly- he does become a better man. Indeed, his next prison sentence comes about because he tries- futilely, of course, this is Piszczyk- to protect his wife from a rioting police and again is interrogated and convicted by the same policeman and gaoled for something he has actually done. It does him no good, of course. His wife, the reformist daughter of a Stalinist, only fancied him as a symbolic former political prisoner and has found another man.
