One of few Agnieszka Holland films not also scripted by her, Fever/Goraczka was banned by Poland’s military government but went on to acclaim at the Gdansk Festival and yet remains one of her lesser-known works. More ironic still, although she figures among Europe’s most respected filmmakers, she is most famous here for recent involvement with HBO’s Baltimore The Wire series. The situation may be remedied by the Museum of Modern Art’s “Agnieszka Holland: Europe/America,” twenty-six days of English-language features, U.S.-premièring Polish ones, episodes from both countries’ television, and appearances by Holland and Ed Harris.

Krzysztof Teodor Toeplitz’ script derives from an Andrzej Strug novel rendered into English as The Story of One Bomb, and, with a surplus of poorly identified characters, is threaded on the movement and possession of the 1905 terrorist bomb which literally begins alongside opening credits and ends the final frames with a watery bang and widening, dying ripples. That story is set contemporaneously with the uprising of Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potempkin and just two years prior to Joseph Conrad’s black ironic The Secret Agent of London anarchists, double-agents provocateurs, and mentally retarded bomb-planters.

Poland had experienced no de facto existence for over a hundred years, and would not until Versailles after World War I. Partitioned among Prussia, Austria and Russia, at the turn of the last century the Poles were further divided among themselves into bourgeois time-servers and officialdom, syndicalists and conservative workers, theoretical revolutionaries and anarchists, out-and-out terrorists and rural bandits. In this time frame, in the house of his mother a chemist (Tadeusz Huk) has barely enough time to assemble one canister bomb and entrust it to an elegant female before the police haul him away. The woman is Kama (Barbara Grabowska), who soon will carry the device in a gift-wrapped box to assassinate the Governor (Ryszard Sobolewski) at a reception-ball. Nervous to distraction, she is ambiguously motivated by admiration and desire for the professional revolutionary terrorist Leon Marek (Olgierd Lukaszewicz), recently sprung from prison by, among others, Kamil (Tomasz Miedzik), who loves her and serves as horse-carriage driver to the ball.

SPOILER ALERT

The attempt never coming off, the three conspirators flee in a downpour, Marek so berating her failure of nerve and ordering her back to doctrinaire soapboxing, that she winds up in a Dickensian mental institution. Dodging police and patrolling Cossacks, Leon heads for Cracow, cold-bloodedly disposes of a suspected informer, and semi-enlists adherents from the countryside Slamowicz gang of brigands.

While the competing and at best loose anti-authority Fighting Force disintegrates and Keystone Kops police let Leon slip through their fingers, the other terrorist who emerges is feckless Wojtek Kielza (Adam Ferency). Slow-thinking to the point of being a danger, lost without anyone to tell him what to do, he hides the explosive at his disillusioned uncle and aunt’s (Marian Lacz, Alicja Sobieraj) before being easily duped and led, unsuspicious, directly to the Okhrana police station. His solitary fate and that of Kama are the only ones that elicit sympathy. His cellmate, a cynical devil-may-care anarchist jailed for other activities, is released the following day, kills the partner who betrayed him, deliver’s Wojtek’s sad note to his relatives, discovers the bomb and laughs his head off as police beat him to a pulp when his terrorist attempt goes awry, too.

Neither novelist Strug nor screenwriter Toeplitz nor director Holland wastes any sympathy on either the brutes who govern and their minions or on the disorganized brutal-with-a-cause patriots (and traitors). Filmed with striking light from single sources but overall as though through a fine veil from mists rising from the river, Fever is consciously distant, sardonic, even cold. No one is really admirable, even with grievances aplenty, in this realistic mix of victims and victimizers, oppressed and oppressors, dreamers and schemers. Villains there are, and fools, just no heroes.

With cosmetic shifts in geography, the tale continues today, a century-plus later. 

(Released by Contal International Inc. and not rated by MPAA.)