From its opening vision of the green life of turn-of-the-century Polish nobility, one has the sense that The Promised Land is truly an “escape novel on film,” into a realm where lovers ride through exquisitely shot birch forests, extended families picnic lingeringly, a healthy woman gaily exits from a villa toward young men cavorting among the trees.... Until it slowly emerges that every picnic is a business meeting, the young men are plotting futures as capitalist mill owners, toward which the woman in question can contribute a handsome dowry, and Andrzej Wajda is about to unfold one of the most searing political attacks ever filmed on the wages of greed. Centering on the three young men - of Polish noble, German immigrant, and Jewish descent, respectively - and following closely the progress of their plan, The Promised Land details aspects of the industrial revolution in Lodz, near Warsaw, that turned that town into a gruesome carnival of speculation for the rich, and a new kind of hell-on-earth for the poor.
Through shots of ghetto streets, photographed with hand-held immediacy, and into the factories where incidents of sexual oppression are commonplace and bodies are routinely devoured by machines, Wajda keeps a literary distance that frees his interpretation of sentimentality - and thus frees the critical viewer to feelings of enormous sadness and anger. His camerawork is a superb expression of time. He dangles his amoral trio at the end of the lens like absurd toys, granting as little compassion to them as they themselves show for those lives blithely manipulated to feed a monstrous desire.
Wajda has created an epic work, based on the controversial turn-of-the-century novel by Nobel prize-winning author Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont. The film has been received equally controversially, for its depiction of the role of Jewish capitalists in the profits race. U.S. visitors to the 1975 Moscow Film Festival, as well as viewers at Filmex 1976 in Los Angeles, openly accused Wajda of anti-Semitism. Wajda has denied the charge, stating that he toned down that aspect of the original novel. (For another impression of Wajda's relationship to this issue, one would do well to see Samson, see Thursday, October 1.) (JB)