MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Austeria’ Honors Lost World of Polish Jewry

“Austeria” (AMC Century 14) is a heady, darkly tragicomic and finally mystical celebration of the perished world of Polish Jewry performed by members of Warsaw’s Yiddish Theatre. A lushly cinematic treat, the film abounds in both dark interior tableaux and verdant pastoral vistas that recall the compositions and the coloring of great Dutch and Flemish paintings. Yet it has an equally intense sense of immediacy, thanks to its fluid, seemingly spontaneous camera movement.

It is the work of the master Polish director, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, best known for “Mother, Joan of the Angels?” (1960), a stunning drama of religious hysteria based on the same bizarre events that inspired Ken Russell’s better-known but less-esteemed “The Devils,” and for “Pharoah” (1965), an intellectual period spectacle with striking similarities to “The Last Emperor.”

Adapted by Julian Stryjkowski from his novel “Austeria” (“The Inn”), along with the director and his long-time co-writer Tadeusz Konwicki, this 1982 film is set primarily in a remote inn in Eastern Galicia, then on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now a part of Russia. It is the first day of World War I, and the inhabitants of a nearby shtetl are fleeing an advancing army of Cossacks. But Tag (Franciszek Pieczka, an actor of dignity and humor), the tall, bearded innkeeper sees no point in running. As the day unfolds Tag will come to see it as the Day of Judgment.

By evening Tag has extended shelter to a highly disparate, mainly Jewish, group of refugees: a pair of youthful star-crossed lovers, the girl’s adulterous stepmother (Golda Tencer), a stray hussar, and a group of Hasidic Jews given to song and prayer. At various points Tag will be overcome by passion for his lush, earthy Ukrainian mistress-servant; by childhood memories, and by an overwhelming sense of fatalism.

Much of the film’s vividness comes from its increasingly ritualistic quality, intensified by various Jewish religious ceremonies and customs. Some of these motifs are deliberately confounding in effect. Early on, many inside the fortress-like inn worry that the singing and dancing of the Hasidic men will attract the Cossacks; later the Hasidim get so carried away in ecstasy that they strip and plunge into a river--at the very moment the Cossacks are preparing to execute an innocent Jewish youth.

In an attempt to recapture the folkloric spirit of shtetl life, “Austeria” (Times-rated Mature for some nudity and some violence) also inevitably foreshadows its coming doom in the era of Hitler. Even though this remarkable film, so gloriously photographed by Zygmunt Samosiuk, has reportedly been censored by Polish authorities, who are said to have softened the sequences of the Cossack pogrom, it leaves us contemplating the terrible suffering of Poland’s Jews and the virtual eradication of their culture at the hands of Russians and Germans alike.