I Would Like to See It: The Devil

A rider in black (Wojciech Pszoniak) arrives at a convent in the midst of the Prussian invasion of Poland. In aspect he resembles a sort of living Repin painting, the wild-eyed tyrant of Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 sprung to life. It’s his manic body language, his exaggerated expressions and wild declarations which animate much of Andrzej Żuławski’s The Devil, a melodramatic picaresque in which a series of chaotic spectacles whirl around themes of personal, political, and social disintegration. As the stranger races through the convent, bursting with gravely wounded Polish soldiers and soon to be overrun by Prussian conquerors in the wake of Poland’s surrender, there’s a sense of mounting horror, a feeling that “out of control” was six stops back and wherever this train is racing now the only possible ending is fire, blood, and the shriek of metal tearing. When the stranger reveals himself not as one fleeing the onset of bloody chaos but as its standard-bearer, Żuławski’s whole film clicks into context.

Like much of Żuławski’s work, The Devil renders the personal/familial sphere a hostile emotional wilderness in which no one has the inclination, energy, or skills to process anything unfolding between or around them. Instead his characters writhe and scream, faces corpse-white under heavy makeup, clothes slashed, hands filthy — this is one of the dirtier movies I’ve seen, its actors and interiors so believably grimy and dusty you can almost feel the itch at the back of your throat — until it inevitably collapses into confused sexualized violence. Incestuous scenarios recur throughout, protagonist Jakub (Leszek Teleszyński) courting sex with both his mother and his sister — the latter having already been raped by their father — perhaps in an attempt to make sense of his shattered self by returning to his origins. That this is precisely what the stranger, his rescuer and tormentor, wants of him is a telling dramatic choice. Jakub has been to war, has embroiled himself in nationalist and populist plots; the film’s titular devil wishes him to bring the fruit these conflicts bore back into the home.

The tensions of the Cold War era tug insistently at every scene. In fact, The Devil was banned by Poland’s then-communist government, an act of censorship which drove a frustrated Żuławski to France for years afterward. Mistrust and political betrayal structure nearly every one of the film’s major conflicts, from the usurpation of Jakub’s life and fiance by his effete best friend — who also harbors homosexual desire for Jakub — and former co-conspirator, Herz (Wiktor Sadecki), to the revelation that Jakub’s mother pimps out her own sons to the elite, collaborating with the same government Jakub sought to tear down in his revolutionary days. That the film often feels abrasive and incoherent works strongly in its favor, leaving melodrama and spectacle — rather than exposition — to communicate important information. The burning of Jakub’s family home is one of the most exquisite images of crisis of its decade, a breathtaking argument for practical effects more eloquent than any impassioned defense. The streaming smoke. Pale fire chewing at the wood. It’s incoherence come to life, its teeth gnashing greedily at the throat of narrative structure until all you can feel and taste and hear is the mad, mindless roar of burning.