Cult Cinema: Success is the Best Revenge (1984) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of ShoutTV

Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, against his own better judgment and perhaps even the way of the world, can’t help but push the envelope as far as the possibilities of avant-garde experimental Eastern European cinema.  Sometimes it proves to be successful for the multiple award-winning filmmaker as with his autobiographical Identification Marks: None, the screenplay to Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water and most recently the Oscar nominated EO.  But in Cannes 1984, one particularly bold piece of borderline phantasmagorical kinetic sociopolitical art known as Success is the Best Revenge starring Michael York and John Hurt nearly bankrupted the director who had to sell his house and move from England to the United States following its tragic demise at the British-French box offices.  But that shouldn’t stop you from checking out one of the director’s wildest, most radical and slyly autobiographical cinematic works with striking uses of sound, imagery and editing forecasting the psychedelia to come in EO including but not limited to flashy visuals and deep heavy reds.
 
Polish theater director Alexander Rodak (Michael York) is stuck in Warsaw following the declaration of martial law to counter the Solidarity movement when he is granted temporary leave to accept an award in Paris before returning to his home in London.  There we meet his embittered wife Alicja (Joanna Szczerbic) and increasingly rebellious son Adam (Michal Skolmowski billed as Michael Lyndon), both played by the director’s real-life wife and son filmed in their own house.  Trying desperately to restage a Solidarity Polish protest on the streets of London he turns to another fellow exiled theater broker Dino (John Hurt) to finance his politicized art project, much to his wife and son’s chagrin.  Following a rough encounter on the streets which winds up in a British courtroom, Adam decides to take far more drastic measures of political rebellion by defiantly dying his hair bright red and returning to the very Warsaw his father fought so hard to get out of.

 
Borne out of a personal experience where Skolimowski discovered his son Michael Lyndon’s journal where he disclosed his dissatisfaction with being exiled from his homeland of Poland.  In response, Skolimowski asked Michal to write a few fictional drafts of his feelings and experiences and with the help of co-writer Michel Ciment Success is the Best Revenge came into being.  An emotionally, politically and artistically complex slice of pure cinema full of the elliptical jumps into elongated tracking shots, fragmented thoughts and words with elements of an intensely personal confessional, the film is joyously freakishly all over the place.  From the rousingly experimental score by Stanley Myers and Hans Zimmer years before achieving superstardom to Britannia Hospital cinematographer Mike Fash’s luminous camerawork compounded with flashy jump-cutting editing by Andrzej Kostenko and Barrie Vince, this is a top-to-bottom contextual sensory assault on the eyes and ears.

 
Michael York as the exiled Polish theater director whose own feelings about his homeland under martial law grow more confused with ego rather than effecting change is generally good in the piece with John Hurt, Anouk Aimee and Michel Piccoli making glorified cameos ala Tim Curry’s sneak into Skolimowski’s The Shout.  The film’s real face and stars emblematic of the Polish people as displaced fishes out of water due to the situation in their country are undoubtedly the director’s real-life wife and son.  Joanna Szczerbic as the beleaguered wife Alicja herself was an accomplished Polish actress who forfeited her success for the future of her two sons Michal and Jerry Jr. who also cameos as younger son Tony Rodak.  Michal is the heart and soul radiating through the film in what is secretly for the big screen a personal exchange between father and son.

 
As producer-writer-director, Jerzy Skolimowski’s deeply personal proclamation of yearning for his homeland and expression of artistic political protest was well received by critics but effectively ended the director’s career in Britain following a total box office failure against an already tight budget.  Though no one seems to talk about the film anymore save for occasional images of the glam David Bowie-like portrait of Michal Skolimowski when looking up other films by the director of EO, there’s ample room for this underrated gem of experimental Polish-British-French cinema to be reevaluated.  Though the film’s availability is scattershot with ShoutTV or Amazon Prime offering viewing options, Success is the Best Revenge nevertheless marks another important forward step in politicized creative expression as a form of abstract art and another stellar example of the feverishly brilliant mind of debatably Poland’s greatest film director.

--Andrew Kotwicki