Just give me a movie with the name 'Andrzej Zulawski' attached to it and I can bet my money that the movie is going to be a once in a life time experience for you! I can't believe that his very first full length feature film deals with subjects like 'Surrealism', 'Existentialism', 'Dopplegangers', 'Borderline Psychedelic', 'Allegories' etc., Without a doubt Zulawski is one of the greatest filmmaker's that ever walked the earth and I'm so honoured and glad that I get to see his works and admire them.
Like my in depth analysis on his movie 'Possession' I'm going to do the same with this and let you know my take on 'The Third Part of the Night'.
Plot: The movie starts with Helena (played by Malgorzata Braunek) reading from the book of Revelations to her husband Michal (played by Leszek Teleszynski), who's slowly gaining consciousness from being ill for the past six weeks and later upon the request of his wife goes out on a walk with his son Lukasz and his father, who's waiting outside the house refusing to meet his wife. While taking a walk and discussing with his father on his wife's behaviour on why she did what she did, his son, Lukasz strays away from him and runs towards his mother who's awaiting the impending apocalypse at the house. When Michal hears the gun shots, he runs towards his family but by that time it's already too late and his entire family gets slaughtered. Feeling devastated and guilty he decides to join the resistance with the help of one of his friends but at his first meeting the gestapo kills his go between man and starts chasing him. During his escape he hides at an apartment where coincidentally he see another man wearing the same trench coat and the police catches him thinking him to be the person that they were chasing. Michal stays silent during the period but the other person's wife(Marta) who's pregnant, not knowing what happened, tries to explain the gestapo but they just arrest him and take him away for questioning. Seeing this she gets into a panic attack and goes into labour and asks Michal who's standing at the sidelines while watching the whole incident, to help her with the delivery. Michal to his surprise notices that Marta is a doppelgänger of his dead wife Helena and starts to atone for his sins and his guilt for his dead family by helping Marta and her new born baby. In the process Michal succumbs to his own reality, reliving his past which is surreal, horrifying and borderline psychedelic. Let's delve into the mind of Michal and try to understand in detail why he sees what he sees and what exactly Zulawski is trying to convey us.
Doppelgängers: My understanding is that in reality there are no Doppelgängers in this movie. It's just Michal's mind playing tricks on him because of the horrifying event that happened at the start with his family. He sees his wife in Marta because of the guilt that he couldn't save his family and that he survived and he thinks that he got a second chance (to be precise, a 'miracle' in his own words) to take care of his family by employing himself in the development of vaccine for typhus by letting the lice feed on him.
Now the question arises why only Marta but why not in other women can Michal see his wife Helena? Like for example in 'Sister Kalra' or 'The Lice Breeder' etc., ?: To answer this, its because of the events that transcribed around Marta which duplicates his wife Helena's from the past. Zulawski has shown us those events in a non chronological order by showing us his past right after he encounters a similar event in his present. For example when he meets Marta for the first time and delivers her baby, he immediately recalls how he met Helena and the talk surrounding the birth of Lukasz, where Michal says he's not ready to be a father but only this time he wants the course of events to be changed by being ready when he claims the baby to be Marta's, her husband's and his. Similar events like how he became the 'lice-feeder' in his past upon Helena's request and how he turned out to be one in the present on his own will, how he replaced Helena's first husband and felt guilty about it and how he replaced Marta's in the present without any guilt, how Marta and her new born baby end up at the same attic where Michal had lived with Helena and Lukasz in the past while trying to hide from the gestapo, how Helena's first husband surrenders himself to the Germans and how his sister Klara does the same in the present etc., all these events tells us that Michal is reliving his past but only this time he's the one in the driver's seat trying to change the course of history, which he couldn't do in the end by succumbing to his own reality.
Metaphors surrounding Lice and other elements:
1. Concept of Lice: During my research I came to know that Zulawski's father, Miroslaw Zulawski used to work as lice feeder in the Typhus research institute during the World War II, so in a way he portrayed the sufferings of his own family during the World War II with the concept of Lice feeders and breeders. So people would take extreme measures to avoid getting into the van and going to concentration camps by getting themselves a permit as lice feeders though they dislike doing it and consider it to be a life degrading. Michal who is one of the feeders tries to create a vaccine by donating his infected blood which in a way he's trying to be human to his oppressors when they brought down chaos upon him. He suffers physically and psychologically the same way Helena's first husband did.
2. A Blind resistance by literally a blind leader.
3. Conversation with his father when he asks him what is more important ? "The things people sacrifice for each other or the things they share and want to save?" to which his father responds to by saying "To save? Nothing can be saved" and Michal trying to do both by sacrificing himself and saving Marta's husband in the end.
Ending: During the final sequence when Michal tries to save Marta's husband, he gets scared when he sees Helena's first husband in his place and tries to escape from the hospital only to find himself at a corner with a sheet covering the body on a stretcher and when he removes the sheet he finds the body to be himself and suddenly his reality starts to crumble taking us to his house in the country where the four horsemen awaits to unleash the apocalypse outside the house while Marta braids her hair similar to what Helena did at the beginning of the movie awaiting her death. I guess what Zulawski tried to explain us is that regardless of Michal's second attempt to save the family by changing the course of history he found himself at the same place where he did at the beginning of the movie, no matter what he did.
This is not your typical world war holocaust movie where we see soldiers killing hundreds of people and planes dropping bombs on cities etc., this is a movie where we see how a human mind descends into madness amongst the chaos surrounding him and Zulawski has picked one character named Michal, dissected his mind and showed his thoughts, now just multiply it with a million and look at the thoughts of each individual on how they've faced the surrealistic nature of the world around them amidst this chaos, the image itself is really a horrifying one!!
There can be n number of thoughts on the interpretation of different aspects of this movie especially the ending sequence because I'm not sure whether Michal's dead or not and if he is whether he's dead at his house in the country? Or at the hospital? And the director just portrayed us with his after thoughts while he slowly descents into limbo regardless of where is ?
