Hands Up!

Hands Up! has two planes of action. The contemporary part is set at a reunion party of medical-school alumni and on board a freight train, where five of them reminisce on their past and the lives of their parents, who fought in the war. The second plane is set in the 1950s, when all of them were students and took upon themselves the task of assembling a huge portrait of Stalin. The portrait turned out to be faulty, having two pairs of eyes. Consequently, they had to explain their mistake to a commission, comprised of activists in the youth organisation, which accused them of sabotage. The main victim of the mistake was, of course, Andrzej Leszczyc.
As with the three earlier parts of the four-part Leszczyc series, the director takes issue here with the relationship between Poland’s present, which is represented as consumerist and morally thwarted, and its past, on this occasion the war and the Stalinist past. The film tackled the ever-contentious topic of Polish Stalinism, so Skolimowski was asked to self-censor his film, cutting out the episode with the four-eyed Stalin. His refusal meant that the film ended up on the plank and precipitated the director’s emigration. Of all the films Skolimowski made, Hands Up! seems most expressionistic. The camera is static and the interior of the train looks like a stage, where characters play out their psychodrama. (EMK)