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Rating: Even before Possession, another of his absolute pinnacles, "Diabel" with its original excursions towards an increasingly oppressive fantasy, already manifests that poetics of the "demonic" understood not so much as evil in the classical sense but rather as a substantial absence of order, both in a philosophical and human sense.
As a work, it will prove to be, perhaps, the most visually degrading and unpleasant of his entire production over time.
The film in question revealed on an international level the "paroxysmal" talent and filmically schizophrenic attitudes of the genius Zulawski to the point of becoming, over time, even a sensational success (even if initially, only in those that were the intellectually most active and à la page "d'essay" circles of the time).
During the invasion of Poland by the Prussian army in 1793, the young Polish nobleman Jakub, a prisoner, is freed by a stranger who, in exchange, demands from Jakub a complete list of his fellow conspirators. Traveling with him, Jakub witnesses the rampant chaos and moral corruption that reign in his country, including the death of someone dear to him and the infidelity of his betrothed.
Now mentally overwhelmed by so many atrocities, he begins to commit a series of bloody murders for no apparent reason.
The unique visionary nature of this work, the extraordinary cinematography, together with the skilful mastery of the director in directing the actors (in this, one cannot help but remember Werner Herzog) makes this film an objectively "sui generis" work.
Yes, because in addition to the obvious contrast between abstractionism and baroque chromaticism that prevails in its realization, the film is also, in the editing (with a disconcerting advance over the times), a pioneering work of significant cinematic solutions that will be adopted only several years later, such as the handheld camera technique (which contributes not a little, even technically, to making many of the film's sequences even more distressing and anxiety-provoking).
In conclusion, a work that metaphorically represents a sort of fresco of the darkest "rot" that dwells in the human soul and mind or that for obscure reasons eventually ends up possessing them (all too easy, in some ways, to identify the "strong>devil" of the title with the protagonist himself), a delirious exercise in visual hysteria that at times almost seems to mock the naivety of the average viewer, perhaps more accustomed to the lethargy and predictability of classic peplum, colossal films, etc., or a certain cinema more inclined to historical dramas narrated in a relatively more conventional and linear way.
For honesty, I will confess that even I did not have the stomach to endure its viewing in its entirety, but at least as a layman, I could not personally remain ensnared by the proposal of one of the most lucidly and anarchically insane directors of his generation and of all time, so much so that in the end, I do not hesitate to reiterate having found it even more disturbing and alienating than the other masterpiece dated 1981...
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