to ensure his actor’s partial recovery. Only then could the frail Pekos, who was in his mid-fifties, retell his story. Structured as a long extended flashback, the film recre- ates Pekosiński’s lonely years at an orphanage and his struggles as a young adult caught between the machina- tions of the vulgar apparatchiks of the Communist Party and the Catholic Church. Pekosiński plays himself as a child, and so undergoes a kind of symbolic regression. His biography is emblematic: it starts in 1939 as WWII breaks out and spans the entire communist period. Throughout, nonfiction dictates the film’s narrative shape. Pekosiński’s stillness, partly a result of his illnesses, and his un-mod- ulated speech clash with the stylized professional acting of his fellow performers. Yet the more artificial the setting and the greater the dissonance, the more Pekosiński’s unique character, particularly his newly found resilience, shine through. Królikiewicz, whose own childhood bears similarities to Pekosiński’s (they were born the same year and Królikiewicz also was almost orphaned while fleeing the Nazis), traces his subject’s vulnerability with uncanny acuity and tenderness. It is often said that character is destiny, but for
Królikiewicz physiognomy is equally important. A long- time teacher of a Working with Actors workshop in Łódź, Królikiewicz thinks of actors plastically: there are the ple- beian features of Franciszek Trzeciak, whom Królikiewicz casts repeatedly as Everyman, and the severely chis- eled cheeks of Anna Nieborowska, who resembles a Gothic religious icon, referring us back to the drama of the Crucifixion. In The Case of Pekosiński, physiognomy and destiny are inseparable. Who can forget his asym- metrical face, whose lax expression belies his tactical intelligence? Or his hunched back, his ungainly gait? Pekosiński is both lowly and exalted, a child and a sage— what Królikiewicz saw as a chance to realize his “baroque” aesthetics, a mix of terror and the sublime, in the flesh.
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Apart from the historical and personal connections, the sheer breadth of the project beyond the shoot makes The Case of Pekosiński extraordinary. Just as Through and Through is a drama of masculin-
ity, The Case of Pekosiński becomes a drama of identity. Pekosiński, whose mother threw him over a fence onto a potato heap as she was being transported to a con- centration camp, has no knowledge of his real name or origins. His biography becomes a kind of carte blanche for the communists: a child of eastern Poland, a victim of Nazi aggression, he is the ideal pinup for the social- ist state. Pekosiński’s anguished refrain, “Who am I, truly?” contrasts with his communist instructor’s boast- ful claim, “Now we finally know what to call our nation— Polish People’s Republic.” In another scene, Pekosiński is coached to say who rescued him from death as an infant. “My father,” Pekosiński repeats stubbornly, but is told to say, “I recall clearly that the Soviet partisans picked me up.” Such revision of history was a common experience for Poles under communism (the Katyń Forest mas- sacre of Polish officers by the Soviet troops, pinned for decades on the Nazis until Russia declassified its secret documents, is probably the most notorious example of such manipulation of facts). With Poland’s sovereignty at risk, Polish identity remained as painful a topic as under previous occupations. Yet in places, the film’s tone lightens and the narra-
tive slips into a farce. There is the sight of drunk, belch- ing Pekosiński in a white garment as he desperately tries to perform his duties as altar boy. There are the urgings of his communist instructor to “remember to always be the best!,” “a living monument!,” which ring like the socialist slogans from Wojciech Wiszniewski’s Wanda Gościmińska, a Weaver. Humor plays yet another func- tion—in the chess-playing scenes set in the present, we can see the sparks of Pekosiński’s old swagger shining
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