How subversive can a movie be if your class has to write an essay on it? The figures which Rejs (The Cruise) pokes fun at are historical relics, and to some Poles, the movie is stale; a satire of a lost era. But to a foreigner, the film maintains its power. Its message, unworn by time, remains simple but perfectly, and universally, true: the human spark for creativity chafes against oppression.

Marek Piwowski's 1970 film takes place on a cruise-boat floating along a river, and it is an obvious allegory for Poland under Communism. The stakes in this movie are, on the surface, small. The boat’s bureaucracy, its entire structure of power, is predicated on petty deceit; white-lies and little fibs. This authority, which derives from nowhere, is the source of Rejs absurdity. It is an unserious movie about what was, and remains, a serious topic.

Stanisław Tym plays a nameless petty crook who becomes a cultural coordinator on the ship. Unwittingly, he finds himself in a position of power. As the movie progresses, he becomes comfortable with it, but standing in front of the ship’s passengers and leading their first meeting, he looks unsure of himself. The meeting spirals into a meta-meeting (“No one is forcing us to sit here. On the contrary I’m sitting here out of pure pleasure!”), but behind the nonsense lie hints of pathos. Piwowski is talking directly to the Polish viewer of 1970. In that society of procedure, where pleasure is sanctioned, and entertainment is sterile, such self-reference is both potent and funny.

After Tym, a young, weedy man with glasses begins to speak. His ideas come out distorted, his voice weak, hand over his mouth. He talks of “meeting people, entering their lives, their worries.” The audience, of course, cannot hear him. “Sorrow and nostalgia!” he whimpers. These are the longings not only of Polish artists under Communism, but of anyone who aches for expression under dehumanizing political systems. Piwowski’s brilliance is that his movie speaks beyond the Polish experience and to the human experience. “I want to enter people’s lives, I want to know their worries,” the young man says. What better way to describe the artist’s project?

The moral core of the movie unfolds in a single scene. A musician with his eyes cast downwards, his face swollen with emotion, begins to sing sorrowfully, which in its very sadness, is a challenge to the boat’s regime. The camera cuts to men drinking tea at a cafeteria table beside him. It’s a wonderful shot in its simplicity, in the guarded curiosity his fellow passengers show.

Tym is, of course, sleeping. He awakens and admits he missed the song, a small concession before he destroys both art and artist, distorting the song through the prism of Marxist utopianism and turning its intention upside down: “Gentlemen you are misinterpreting this song… it is optimistic, cheerful, with many humorous elements!” As Tym becomes enrapt by his own propaganda the musician gingerly touches his face with his hands, as if to remind himself that he is a man, that he still exists. One of the other men quietly responds to the chief’s polemic, a response that highlights in the sharpest language, the limits of ideology: “But where do the tears in his eyes come from?”

The film deflates after the scene, but ends beautifully, and quietly, as the ship skims along the oil-black water of the Vistula at nighttime.

Rejs, or The Cruise, was directed by Marek Piwowski, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Janusz Głowacki. The score was composed by Wojciech Kilar. Piwowski was also the movies cinematographer. The movie stars Stanisław Tym, Zdzisław Maklakiewicz, and Jan Himilsbach.