War correspondent Jerzy returns to Warsaw, says the wrong thing on TV, and watches powerlessly as his career, relationship and reputation disintegrate. The first of five Wajda screenplays written by Agnieszka Holland, Without Anesthesia loosely adapts the travails of journalist Ryszard Kapuściński yet treads a claustrophobic, Kafkian path wholly its own. Poland’s cinema of moral unrest meets American paranoid thriller in one man’s odyssey through government systems set to kill. Krystyna Janda excels as wordless student Agata, observing Jerzy’s descent into apathy and alcohol head-on. A worthy successor to 1977’s Man of Marble, the film emerged at a raucous time in Poland’s politics, which is to say at the peak of its political cinema. (Krzysztof Zanussi’s Camouflage and Feliks Falk’s Top Dog both date to 1977-78.) Wajda would return to the 1920s in Maids of Wilko, but not before receiving wide acclaim for the roughness of Without Anesthesia both at home and internationally.