Starring Bogusław Linda. In Polish with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Polish master Andrzej Wajda was 90 when he made this, capping off a 65-year career as stylistic master and agent provocateur. It’s fair to imagine that he identified more than a little with his film’s subject, Władysław Strzemiński, an early hero among Polish and Soviet artists who was nonetheless hounded to death for sticking to his painterly principles.

Similarly venerable Polish star Bogusław Linda is more than convincing as Strzemiński, who lost an arm and leg in the First World War and then went to Moscow to do foundational work with avant-gardists like Kazimir Malevich. This landed him a privileged place in postwar Łódź, where he helped found an art school but came to be at odds with the increasingly dogmatic commissars Stalin put in charge of Poland’s culture in the late 1940s.

When a new apparatchik hectors Strzemiński’s students about the requirement that art “not raise doubts but create enthusiasm”, the painter blasts the Philistine and crutches his way out of the meeting. From that moment on, he loses one right after another, including access to paint supplies and, eventually, food. The chain-smoking doesn’t help, but it goes with the self-abnegation that Wajda portrays as a kind of stubborn saintliness.

We know that Strzemiński is estranged from his wife, the equally famous sculptor Katarzyna Kobro (Aleksandra Justa), but we barely see her, nor do we know why their preternaturally mature daughter (Justa’s own offspring, Bronisława Zamachowska) is in a kind of orphanage.

There’s not a lot of his own art on display, either, so the film—gorgeously shot but doggedly repetitive in tone—asks us to invest our craggy hero with motivations that remain pure yet inscrutable. Wajda died just after this image was complete.