In summer 1945 Tadeusz, an officer of the Armia Krajowa and veteran of the Warsaw uprising, whose wife was raped and murdered by the Germans, moves to Masuria, a region in former GermanEast Prussia, which became part of Poland as a result of the Potsdam Agreement after World War II. He visits Róża, a widow of a German Wehrmacht soldier whose death Tadeusz had witnessed, to hand over her husband’s possessions. Róża invites Tadeusz to stay at her farm to protect her against marauders and the brutal rapes she had previously experienced during the Soviet East Prussian Offensive and in the lawless atmosphere of postwar Masuria. From this partnership of purpose, slowly respect and love arises - a "frowned-upon relationship" attracting the "unwelcome attention of the new Polish nationalists as well as the notorious Soviet NKVD".[3]
While Róża is regarded a German by the new Polish authorities, thus facing her expulsion, Tadeusz wants her to declare her Polish nationality as many Masurians did in a "humiliating nationality verification procedure"[3]
As director Wojciech Smarzowski calls it, the Masurians "fell victim to two instances of renationalisation and were later destroyed".[4][5][6]
Variety has called the movie "almost unbearably brutal yet hauntingly romantic" and commended "Genre-savvy helmer Smarzowski's gritty mise-en-scene augments the force of the narrative, putting into visual terms its themes of ill-fated love and a nation doomed by nationalism. What in other hands might have played as costume melodrama focused on the victimized title character here takes the perspective of the loner hero, as Smarzowski gives the pic the hallmarks of a latter-day Western."[3]
Giuseppe Sedia in a review for the Krakow Post wrote: "From a moral point of view Róża is a Western crammed with violence but filmed without complacency. Smarzowski referred to himself as the “third Cohen brother” and there may be a kernel of truth in this, at least in his commitment to injecting a dose of realism into movie genres that have never been fully developed in Polish cinema"."[8]
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