Polish filmmaker’s works pack a punch

Skolimowski retrospective runs the gamut

May 29, 2011|By Ty Burr, Globe Staff

Jerzy Skolimowski (above) and his long and varied career will be the focus… (FRED DUFOUR/AFP/GETTY…)

Jerzy Skolimowski is one of the cinema’s most enigmatic ghosts. Born in Poland in 1938 and trained at the National Film School in Lodz, he’s part of the same cultural generation with Roman Polanski — restless, skilled, profoundly cynical — and in fact co-wrote Polanski’s breakthrough feature, “Knife in the Water’’ (1962). Yet while his colleague found fame and infamy in Hollywood, Skolimowski stayed under the radar, skipping from country to country while directing films that are obsessed with the notion of exile. Few of his movies look like any of the others; all reveal a prankish pessimist with a startling command of his medium.

Not a few of them are masterpieces, even if the director has so fallen between the cracks that he’s barely represented on DVD. Skolimowski took a 17-year break from filmmaking, starting in the 1990s, concentrating on painting and occasionally turning up as an actor (he was Naomi Watts’s semi-criminal uncle in “Eastern Promises’’). In 2008 he returned to the director’s chair and next week he arrives in person at the Harvard Film Archive as the culmination of a rare retrospective of his work.

The two Skolimowski films best known to US audiences are probably 1970’s “Deep End’’ and 1982’s “Moonlighting,’’ both made in England after the director had voluntarily fled his native country. “Deep End,’’ which kicks off the retrospective this Friday, is a dyspeptic kiss-off to swinging London that follows a gauche teenage boy (John Moulder-Brown) as he desperately tries to learn about sex while working at a crumbling public bath. Acridly funny and unexpectedly sad, the film’s a key work of the early ’70s, with a use of color — especially the reds of blood, passion, costar Jane Asher’s hair — that hasn’t dated one bit. (The same can’t be said for the Cat Stevens songs on the soundtrack.)

“Moonlighting’’ (playing Friday, June 10) provided the young Jeremy Irons with one of his first major film roles, as the leader of a group of Polish workmen illegally renovating a flat in London. It’s the Skolimowski movie that most directly addresses exile, with Poland’s 1981 declaration of martial law, intended to silence the Solidarity movement, effectively marooning the workers in hostile territory. A beautiful work, mordant and alert to every nuance of alienation, and Irons is heartbreakingly good.