Krystyna Janda plays women who will not lower their voices. For Wajda and Kieślowski she made stubbornness look like a moral position, and the pitch that can tire you over a long film is the reason those films are remembered with her face on them.
Fi1m perspective
The first thing Krystyna Janda does in Man of Marble (1977) is refuse to slow down. Agnieszka strides through corridors in a denim jacket and flares, chews gum in front of officials, smokes in the archive and tells her cameraman to get low and put the wide lens on. She wears the same clothes for the whole film, like a student who has not been home. Everyone around her is tired. She is not, and Andrzej Wajda builds the film around the difference.
Wajda brought her back as Agnieszka in Man of Iron (1981), and they made six films together in all; "Stworzył mnie Wajda", she has said, which means Wajda made her. The 1980s put her in front of the other Polish directors who counted. For Ryszard Bugajski she played Antonina Dziwisz in Interrogation, a woman imprisoned and questioned under Stalinism, shot in 1982 and kept off screens until 1989. For Krzysztof Kieślowski she was Dorota Geller, a pregnant violinist, in Decalogue II (1988), and Dorota again in Decalogue V (1989). István Szabó's Mephisto (1981) took her abroad as Barbara Bruckner. Through all of it she stayed on stage, at Warsaw's Ateneum from 1975 to 1987; she founded her own Polonia Theatre in 2005, directed a feature, Pestka, in 1995, and went back to Wajda for Tatarak in 2009.
The stage explains the screen. Janda acts at full voice and full body, and she does not scale it down for a lens. Some early notices called the delivery mannered, and we can see what they meant. In Man of Marble she is pitched at one level for the whole run, and we admit she wore us down around the middle hour; we wanted her to sit still for a scene. Then we noticed that nobody else in the film had any energy left, and that hers was doing the work the story needed. Wajda gets the best from her by setting that pitch against a country that has given up. Kieślowski asks for less, and in Decalogue V she is one figure among several rather than the centre, which suits a film about a killing and a death sentence rather than about her.
She has spoken herself about the cost of Agnieszka: the part became a face for a generation, and for a while it made her careful about what she took on. Start with Man of Marble. If the volume bothers you at the hour mark, stay; the film is counting on it.
Biography
Krystyna Jolanta Janda is a Polish film and theatre actress. She graduated from the State Dramatic Arts College in Warsaw in 1975.
She is known for her roles as Agnieszka in Man of Marble (1977) and Man of Iron (1981), Dorota Geller in Decalogue II (1989) and Decalogue V (1989), Barbara Bruckner in Mephisto (1981), and the lead in Interrogation (1989). She has also directed for theatre and film, and appeared in On the Silver Globe (1989) and Elles (2011).
Janda won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990 for Interrogation.
