MOONLIGHTING Movie Review

A group of Polish workers is illegally brought into London to renovate a house. But when martial law is declared back in Poland, the group's foreman (Jeremy Irons) makes the god-like decision to keep the men in the dark so as to get the project completed on time and on budget. Jerzy Skolimowski's simple but brilliantly worked out fable about manipulation and power is a political parable told on such convincingly human terms that its significance as metaphor may not bowl you over until the very end—which is as it ought to be. Irons is an inspired choice as the tyrannical, sociopathic foreman who plays with his charges’ lives and feels no anxiety doing so—until, of course, he considers the consequences of being caught. Moonlighting is one of the most elegant and convincing—and bitterly funny—movies ever made about the eternal lure of fascism and the universal specter of the bully. Best Screenplay Award to Skolimowski, Cannes Film Festival.

NEXT STOP … Deep End, Man of Marble, Death and the Maiden

1982 (PG) 97m/C PL GB Jeremy Irons, Eugene Lipinski, Jiri Stanislay, Eugeniusz Haczkiewicz; D: Jerzy Skolimowski; C: Tony Pierce-Roberts; M: Hans Zimmer. VHS, LV USH