Poland in wartime, with few actual Nazis in evidence, but with collaborators, resisters, fence-sitters, and a beautiful fur-coated married Jew who jumps off one of the death trains (much like the ones, and in much the same countryside, featured at length in Shoah) and hides out in the cellar of a prosperous farmer. The central characterization -- the man, not the catalyzing woman -- achieves a remarkable level of ambiguity on the way to its personalized definition of morality: a concept inseparable, here, from situation and character. The character in question (scrutinized in somewhat monotonous closeup) is a long-time but unconfirmed bachelor, a one-time theological student and currently active masturbator, terrified of women, but emboldened somehow by this particular woman's total desperation, her unrepayable indebtedness to him, not to mention her illness on first arrival and frailty forever after. Under the circumstances it would hardly be fair to brand the man, as there is strong intermittent temptation to do, hypocritical or cowardly or worse. Unconsistent, certainly; irresolute and unpredictable; not up to every challenge at every turn; able to see the right path but not always to follow it; in a word, all too human. The ending, as is most readily possible in these ambiguous sorts of circumstances, delivers a very high grade of irony. With Armin Mueller-Stahl, Elisabeth Trissenaar, and Margit Carstensen; directed by Agnieszka Holland. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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