Word: ewa
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Born Nikolai Fedorovich Artamonov, he was a 30-year-old captain in the Soviet navy when he defected to the U.S. in 1959 with his Polish fiancee Ewa. For nine months American agents questioned him about Soviet naval secrets at safe houses in Virginia. Then Artamonov changed his name to Nicholas Shadrin and went to work for the Pentagon as an intelligence analyst. He married Ewa, became a U.S. citizen and settled into the good bourgeois life in McLean, Va. He made no attempt to hide his background as a defector; he testified about it before the House Committee...
...next time we see her, she is whistling men off the streets back in Poland for 25 rubles worth of fun. If her passion still burns for Niepolomski, who by this time has landed in prison and made a fast marriage for money, Ewa certainly carries her torch in some strange positions...
Borowczyk, also the screenwriter, does not stop Ewa's fall here. Within the next 45 minutes, and to the triumphant strains of Mendelsohn's Violin Concerto in E Minor, Ewa stuffs her illegitimate child down an outhouse hole, pull a love-sick count by the nose all the way to Paris, and finally succumbs to a shifty-looking criminal who uses her charms to defraud the hapless count. "Isn't this going too far? we begin to wonder...
...Enough flip talk," more sensitive cineastes will now protest. "This is serious stuff," they will say: it's the heart-rending saga of how, as Tom Milne wrote in the Monthly Film Bulletin, "Ewa becomes enmeshed by a life of degradation and crime, yet herself remains essentially uncontaminated throughout, protected by the purity of her singleminded pursuit of love...
...Dzieje Grzechu) that puts its heroine through so many wringers of wantonness? "Aha," the inspiration must have struck him, "play it like a real, noble love-story; make it feel like Dr. Zhivago." As the rousing Mendelsohn theme strikes up for the umpteenth time, we hardly register that Ewa has just consented to help her pimp assassinate the now rich Niepolomski. So what if she has to throw herself in front of a bullet to protect him from her own treachery? So what if she dies looking like a streetwalker, her painted face in his hands? The score...