Review of Landscape After Battle

It's far from perfect, but then the greatest films are rarely perfect. Technically, it's sometimes jarring. The freed camp prisoners don't look starved or weak. Their vengeance on a guard seems limited to trying to drown him in a mud puddle (even though it's obviously supposed to be freezing). The American soldiers are very poorly dubbed and not very well played. The film is talky, and overly intellectualized. It takes a long time to get going. Well, perhaps this last is intentional, since the story is about a liberated Polish prisoner of war in a refugee camp who withdraws from the world and seeks solace in books and poetry. Eventually he meets a Jewish girl who tries to engage him in the world again. As he is beginning to emerge from his shell and respond to her, she is senselessly killed. Visiting her body in the morgue, he allows himself to feel the pain of her death. It is these latter scenes and the extraordinary quality of Celinska's acting that make this film powerful and ultimately a great film. Seldom, if ever, have I felt a person's death on the screen so personally and deeply as with this film.