I’ve mentioned the Fill-In Filmography poster I have more than once, and every so often, I’ll look it over to see what movies are listed on there that I have either never seen or in some cases never heard of. Recently, that included Kanal. I saw it listed in the “Life in Wartime” section, but that was about all I knew about it. A little light research told me it was a Polish movie about a resistance group fighting the Germans in World War II that has to go underground quite literally by hiding in the sewers of Warsaw. That actually sounded rather cool and interesting to me. I can’t claim to have ever seen a Polish movie before that I can recall.
Oh, and it’s on The Criterion Channel’s streaming service? OK, let’s see how it turned out.
It’s 1944, and the Warsaw Uprising is happening. This was an ultimately doomed attempt by the Polish Underground to liberate Warsaw from the Germans as they were retreating from the Red Army coming in from the East. A narrator introduces the various main characters, a group of fighters, military and civilian, who are part of a gradually shrinking group of resistance fighters trying to liberate their city. Said narrator then, after introducing the men, women, and at least one underage boy, the movie will be following informs the audience that this is the story of the last few hours of their lives. The movie is a tragedy. Do not expect these people to live.
And indeed, they won’t. Narrators like this don’t lie, and by the movie’s end, there are maybe two still alive, and they may not be alive much longer. Despite the best efforts of the fighters, they aren’t equipped well enough to fight off the Germans, and they all seem to know it. When the big attack finally comes, the fighters have no choice but to go into the sewers until they can find a safe place to come out. They have a scout, a woman they call Alice (Teresa Iżewska), who has been down in the sewers quite a bit and knows her way around. Unfortunately, in the chaos, while dodging German gas attacks and booby traps, the fighters get separated from one another, and there’s only one Daisy. The movie told me at the start these people are doomed. Can they at least go out as heroically as possible?
Bottom line: as a tragedy, this movie really works. Well before the fighters go into the sewers, the movie takes time to get to know the prominent ones, like the young lovers and the composer whose family is behind the German line. These are the sorts of people that should provoke sympathy with the audience, and these are also people who seem to understand their chances of winning are remote. When one fighter spots a young woman he knew once, one he borrowed some shoes from, she tells him she doesn’t need them anymore, only for the movie to reveal she lost a leg at some point. Another man, wounded, falls into a makeshift graveyard. It’s not a subtle movie. It is still a highly effective movie.
As such, as the survivors start to get winnowed down, some by German traps, some by unexpected obstacles, and at least one to madness, it hits as hard as it should. A good tragedy, like Hamlet, doesn’t hide the fact the main characters are going to die a sad death. The better ones will even set it so the audience can feel something for these people as human beings, so their final fates are all the sadder. Kanal does all that on a historic backstop that people with some knowledge of the situation knew in advance was doomed to fail. It’s like watching Titanic without somehow knowing about the iceberg if you know your 20th century Polish history. Kanal works by showing people fighting the inevitable, but doing so knowingly because even if they can’t win, they do have to try. It’s better to die fighting than to live under Nazi control.
Grade: A
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