Warsaw in 1980, and television journalist Winkel (Marian Opania) is ploughing through another day's work with little enthusiasm, especially as the strikes hitting the nation have never been out of the news recently and given him an even greater workload. Then, as if things could not get any worse, he is in the middle of preparing a new discussion programme when he is told there is a telephone call for him from somebody official. Suitably worried, he discovers it's a government office who want to meet with him and there's no way out of it, they have sent a car to pick him up and escort him to Gdansk; on the journey he takes a few swigs from his vodka bottle for Dutch courage, but he'll need a tough hide if he wishes to make it through his latest assignment...
Not anything to do with Robert Downey Jr, Man of Iron, or Czlowiek z zelaza if you were Polish, was the sequel to director Andrzej Wajda's much acclaimed examination of the stirrings of the democratic movement in that Eastern European country Man of Marble, and in its way it acted as a mirror image of that work. Where the 1977 effort had featured Krystyna Janda as film student Agnieszka interviewing all and sundry about a forgotten hero of Communism whose idealism turned sour, this featured the opposite of her forthright, confrontational and youthful enthusiasm in the character of Winkel, who is a timid, borderline alcoholic extremely reluctant to learn any more about his mission than is really necessary.
That mission is to dig up dirt on the son of the hero from the first film, Maciej Tomczyk (Jerzy Radziwilowicz, back from before playing his own offspring), and Winkel is determined to be apolitical, no matter that he is being forced to take the side of the authorities rather than the Solidarity movement which is bringing them to their knees with the strikes and demands for social reform. The journalist seems almost cast to make a mockery out of that initial instalment, which after Wajda's encounters with the censors could well have been the intention, only where the previous entry had its ending chopped off, leaving the narrative compromised, it did afford the director the opportunity to pick up where he left off.
Not only that, but he was able to include the grand finale to Janda's character's story as part of this movie, which must have been satisfying though in more censorship-baiting that cannot have endeared him to the powers that be we discover Agnieszka is now a political prisoner, a fate presumably crossing the minds of those whose job it was to regulate what the Poles were allowed to say in their media with regard to Wajda - no wonder his next epic was Danton, made in France. Agnieszka has matured by this point, with echoes of her go-getter personality but now worrying about her baby and her husband, who happens to be Tomczyk, yes, there's space for a little romance this time around, why not? There's space for plenty in its two-and-a-half hour running time.
Personality was the key, as taking Agnieszka's cue everyone here was in possession of some kind of memorable character trait or other, meaning what could have worn the audience down with sheer weight of information has more quirks and idiosyncrasies than your usual dry political tract. Winkel in particular makes for a most unlikely hero, his consciousness raised with each interview until he feels brave enough to stand proud with Solidarity, only to find he has blotted his copybook with them through no fault of his own. Don't go thinking Wajda was allowing his revolutionary fervour to stick him with a pair of rose-tinted spectacles, as he was very clear-eyed about the state of modern Poland at the beginning of the turbulent eighties, knowing democracy was not going to be introduced without a fight, almost predicting the triumphs of Lech Walesa (who appears as himself, in an endorsement) were in for a rocky road ahead before long. Wajda was able to complete his trilogy over thirty years after, so you could observe this doesn't have an ending either. Music by Andrzej Korzynski.
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