Wajda takes three young entrepreneurs and follows their greed and ambition to toxic capitalism’s logical conclusion in this queasily disturbing satire
Andrzej Wajda’s queasily compelling film from 1975, adapted by him from a novel by Wladyslaw Reymont, is an expressionist comic opera of toxic capitalism and bad faith, carried out by jittery entrepreneurs whose skills include insider trading, worker-exploitation and burning down failing businesses for the insurance. It is set in late 19th-century Lodz, a supposed promised land of free enterprise, whose night skies are shown by Wajda as more or less permanently red with factories set ablaze.
Our three gruesome heroes are Karol (Daniel Olbrychski) who is a Pole, Maks (Andrzej Seweryn) who is German, and Moryc (Wojciech Pszoniak) who is Jewish; this last being considered in these times effectively a separate nationality, and in fact the uneasy suspicion between these identities creates something a little like the mood in Danzig, or Gdansk, in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. This trio of ambitious young blades want to join forces and own their own cotton factory, seeing the big money to be made in rapidly industrialising Lodz where raw materials, credit and labour are all relatively affordable. But they need capital, and their respective fathers and employers aren’t coming up with enough. Karol is however having an affair with the blowsy wife of a well-connected local businessman and she gives him secret information of a planned hike in import duty on cotton, allowing him to make a staggeringly lucrative insider market bet. But, like capitalism itself, this adultery and subterfuge has within it the seeds of its own destruction.
