Wiktor, a former Polish underground activist and Poland’s ambassador to Uruguay returns home for his wife’s funeral. He meets Oleg, the Russian deputy foreign minister, an old friend from twenty five years ago. However Wiktor has a nagging suspicion that Oleg had been sent by the Russians to infiltrate the Polish underground and he also suspects that his wife was involved with him. Now he attempts to find out the truth. –BFI
A one-time physics scholar, Polish-born Krzysztof Zanussi began making amateur movies in the late ‘50s, after chancing to take a film course at the University of Warsaw. He graduated the Lodz film school with Death of a Provincial (1966), which won an award at the Venice Film Festival. He emerged as a director/screenwriter in the late ’60s and early ’70s, primarily working for Polish television, until the ’80s, when his association with the Solidarity movement forced him into exile in West German and Swiss productions. One of his films, The Catamount Killing (1974), was shot in English, and his work since the mid-’80s has seen wider international financing and distribution. Zanussi’s work is defined by its devotion to ideas at the expense of emotionalism, and intellectualism without overt passions, which did not prevent his fall from grace with the government during Solidarity’s temporary defeat in the mid-’80s. —allmovie guide
