BLIZNA (THE SCAR) Stephen Bednarz is a successful manager who is handed a plum assignment: to construct a huge synthetic fertilizer factory and a new town to go along with it. The magnitude of the project is stunning. It involves not only the preparation, design and construction of the plant but the social services of the town built for the plant's workers.

As dedicated as Bednarz is to his work he is alienated from his family. His wife refuses to accompany him to the town where they once lived because as the head of a local Party committee she had to fire a teacher which caused a scandal whose exact nature is never explained except through the coded use of a key year in Polish history, 1956, and she has no interest in returning to the site of her humiliation. Their daughter seems feckless and irredeemable, moving through a succession of men, residences and jobs, and, in her fathers estimation, abortions.

The committee of the locality had been petitioning the Central government for years to improve the backward conditions of the area and now, at last, it was their turn. There were dissidents to be sure. Those who bemoan the destruction of a 200 year old forest and acres of meadows. There are those who live either on the site or in the path of the highways that will have to built to access the site or the town which will house the workers and they'll have to be removed by force. All of which, somewhat reluctantly, Bednarz has to oversee. Yet, he opines, its painful for some but the best for the most people.

A documentary filmmaker begins to film the project from the beginning and points out, as they watch the forest being destroyed with brutal industrial efficiency, that the next area over had large tracts of unused wasteland. But it isn't as economically backward so the factory goes here, Bednarz replies, mouthing the official line but not sounding quite convinced but, again, confident of the overall sense of things.

There is one stumbling block at the beginning. The local party wants him to accept their choice for second in command rather than Bednarz's long time assistant. This man happens to be the very man whom his wife fired years before. Bednarz tries to be diplomatic about rejecting the suggestion but the Party insists. Bednarz acquiesces thus setting up another of Kieslowski's Faustian bargains and questionable ethical choices.

The plant is built and cracks in the facade begin which include dropping solid pollution in a five mile shadow down wind. Protest graffiti are painted on the plant. Things break down. Quotas are not met. Bednarz talks with one of the higher ups and voices his doubts, that in fact it had been a seriously flawed project from the beginning. The Party official shrugs his shoulders and says that at least their consciences are clear but Bednarz disagrees, at least his conscience is not totally clear. He asks to be let out of the job. The Party official refuses, reminding him of his duty.

Bednarz carries on in a deteriorating situation. Eventually the workers organize against conditions, caught up in the wave of national discontent (1976 is another milestone year in recent Polish history) and meets the demonstrators in front of his office by agreeing with them and joining their protest.

Of course he is removed, and despite other synopsises, he seems to be quite content playing with his grandchild.

This is the bare outline but by this point in his career Kieslowski was beginning to enrich his films with layers of meaning. Bednarz is established as an earnest and sincere character by turning down a large double apartment for a two room flat. One room is for his darkroom as he is a serious amateur photographer.

The documentary filmmaker returns some years later to do a follow up documentary and acts as something of a Greek chorus to measure the evolution of both the project and Bednarz but also of wider public attitudes. The filmmaker is played by Michal Tarkowski who was the presumed sacrificial lamb in Kieslowsi's PERSONAL (1976). Bednarz assistant is played by Jerzy Stuhr who would star and co-write Kieslowski's AMATOR (1979) (CAMERA BUFF) where he plays an amateur filmmaker turned documentarian. The conversation that Bednarz has where he attempts to resign recalls a scene in his friend, and sometime boss, Zanussi's film an excerpt of which is seen in AMATOR, a film in which Zanussi actually appears as himself. Zanussi's protagonists are invariably engineers and scientists.

His daughter gets pregnant again but this time will marry and have the baby. Her fiancé turns out to be a photographer which is also satisfying for Bednerz. When the documentarian visits Bednarz he notices one large photo on the wall made during the liberation of Poland. The filmmaker notices a relative in the picture and realizes that he must be the child at the center of the photo. This trope would be developed in Kieslowski's later film where sometimes unexplained coincidences exist, warps in the fabric of existence, where non sequitur intersections in time and space produce non consequential crossing of paths (the court scenes in THREE COLORS).

Bednarz is a typical middle period protagonist type- the man in the middle. He is trying to achieve a socially useful goal while acting as ethically as possible but torn by the needs of people below and the demands of people above. The center, as Yeats says, cannot hold, and the only recourse is disengagement which is the tragic ending though it doesn't appear to be in BLIZNA (THE SCAR). Rather than feeling disgraced by being taken off the project, Bednarz he is content, at home with his wife, and playing with his grandchild..

Krzysztof Kieslowski became a highly appreciated art-house director in Europe when he made his TV-series about The Ten Commandments, "Dekalog" (1989). Later on, in the 1990's he directed The Double Life of Veronique and The Three Colours trilogy, which confirmed his position in the international art-house. As most filmmakers do so did he start by making documentaries, then he made two films for the Polish television and after that his first film for the big screen, Blizna (The Scar, 1976).

Kieslowski himself called the film horrible. He criticized its screenplay and categorized the film as socialist realism. He probably saw something I can never be able to see; something that only the one who made the film could see. Blizna is a realistic film about a socialist society, but socialist realism was never even close to realism. It's full of that blind optimism which Stalin so idealized. But Kieslowski's film, Blizna, is incredibly pessimistic: it shows how socialism works, how it doesn't work, how it cannot work and how it's impossible for anyone to make a change in a society like that. However, one shouldn't feel that Kieslowski was a man cheering for individualism, market economy or economic liberalism. He always called himself unpolitical and criticism for the new, capitalist Poland can be seen in his later film Three Colors: White (1993).

Blizna is a story about a corporation which decides to build a new factory in spite of ecology, or the people living in the area. They choose a man with a family to lead the project. Quickly he reveals to be a man who takes responsibility and tries to finish the project with honor. He soon starts to see the flaws of the project, where moral is only one defect. In his journey through Machiavellist politics he finds making a change incredibly difficult.

The authorities of Poland didn't ban Blizna, but they treated it badly, and basically no one saw it until the producer of The Three Colours trilogy brought a bunch of films from Kieslowski's early career to the screen. Having seen Blizna today, it might have partly lost its grip, since it is tightly tied to its own time. The 1970's can be seen in just about everything: in the style, in the narrative, in the dialog and in the costumes. This isn't a bad thing, by any means, but Blizna certainly isn't a timeless classic. But what it is, is a good description of it's time. It shows how Poland worked in the 1970's under the socialist government; how it did not worked. Kieslowski said in his interview book, Kieslowski on Kieslowski by Danusia Stok, how sad it is that no one takes responsibility on what happened during the era -- not even today.

Blizna is very pessimistic and has got inconsolable despair. It shows how impossible it was to make a change in Poland and how hopeless the era was. To put it briefly, it's a satirical description of the authorities of Poland. It is funny, political, pessimistic and very interesting for those who love Kieslowski, European art-house or are interested in history of the 20th century.

Scar is a brave film which takes its time to settle nicely in viewers' minds.It starts in a highly official manner and later develops into a family tragedy.In Scar the best thing to watch is the manner in which all the elements of human weaknesses are portrayed.Helpless characters not being able to come out of their shell is an accepted trait of Kieslowski's films and it is very much evident in The Scar too as its leading player Bednarz is trapped from all sides.He can neither free himself from family pressures coming from his wife and daughter nor from his job under a communist regime.It would be wrong to judge this film's characters based on their actions but it would nevertheless not be wrong to claim that they are victims of unfortunate circumstances as they are being trapped under a system in which change is slow to come and consensus is really reached.For all those interested in Polish cinema they are some very good glimpses of 2 of the most outstanding figures of Polish cinema : a young Agnieszka Holland as an actress and Jerzy Stuhr as a young communist party worker.