THE POSSESSED

The great old man of Polish cinema has put the emphasis of this film adaptation on the internal mechanisms in a group of revolutionaries. Wajda could rely on a cast which assembled numerous up-and-coming stars of the French cinema around Omar Sharif: Lambert Wilson, Isabelle Huppert, Remi Martin, as well as Jean- Philippe Ecoffey. They form the nucleus of a group of revolutionairies led by anarchist Verchovenskij and antichrist Stavrogin. To strengthen the cell’s cohesion, the renegade printer Shatov shall be killed. His wife had been lured by Stavrogin and dies while giving birth to her child which Shatov doesn’t survive either. Dostojevskij’s pamphlet against atheism and nihilism is presented as a condemnation of revolutionary terror coming from pathologically exceptional characters (such as the “unnaturally beautiful” Stavrogin).