Returning from a business trip, Jerzy Michalowski, top reporter and respected specialist on international matters, learns from his wife Ewa that she wants a divorce and has taken their young daughter away with her. This is the start of the progressive collapse of all the elements that made up Jerzy’s life and made it a success … A far cry from the youthful romanticism and aestheticism of his earlier, much underestimated works from the 1950s (e.g. Ashes and Diamonds), Bez znieczulenia belongs to Wajda’s mature oeuvre. Chronologically, it sits between Man of Marble (1976) and Man of Iron (1981) but it displays far more subtlety than these two films in the relationship established here between the form the story takes – sleek, neutral, almost documentary-like – and the content of the action, namely, this brutal and inexplicable stripping away of all the hero’s achievements, which leads directly to his death. This apparent absence of causality gives the hero’s brief adventure a Kafkian quality, inducing malaise and asphyxiation. Through this form of storytelling, Wajda means to denounce a pervading Stalinist mindset according to which no individual can be considered as a subject with true ownership over themselves, but as an object that the political authorities will dispose of at will, using or rejecting them, as necessary. It is the interference – and dictatorship – of politics in every aspect of an individual’s life that Wajda has illustrated in this somehow enigmatic film that is both sombre and very spectacular. With a noteworthy interpretation by Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, who appeared the previous year in Zanussi’s excellent Camouflage, a film with content not dissimilar to this one, in which he played a contrasting role, cynical and ambitiously triumphant.

Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma. Les films, Editions Robert Laffont, Paris 1992