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The missing actor, the studio in disarray, "a good topic." Zbigniew Cybulski's untimely fate is promptly addressed, the scene being shot involves a leap and a train, the filmmaker (Andrzej Lapicki) does it himself. The superstar is nowhere to be found, the project stalls as cast and crew rattle around his absence. The lead actress (Elzbieta Czyzewska) screams infidelity and brings a razor to her wrists until a clapperboard intrudes upon the frame. "What do I know about him? He's my husband." Neglected at the trendy bash, she offers herself to the camera, the screenwriter is hiding in the closet, jotting down the dialogue. A whirl with a void at its center (cf. Altman's The James Dean Story), the proper format for Andrzej Wajda's tribute to his Ashes and Diamonds muse. No lens is long enough for the man who isn't there, his death has a trio of mourning girls following cans of film piled up on a dolly. (The solution, as befits a pendant of 8½, is to shift the focus to the director's presence.) Amid faddish tricks, "something true on the screen." Revelers on a carousel are spun faster and faster until they're dummies on a roulette, twin profiles against a blank wall point to Bergman, riders on a snowy battlefield are from Kurosawa. Castigation of the auteur, for whom even his own bloody wound becomes a camera subject first and foremost. "It's your film, but our lives." The Cybulski lore, tinted specs and jacket and mug, the hepcat upstart (Daniel Olbrychski) inquires about his wartime myths and reaffirms them, graciously. So does Wajda, who knows that, when dealing with a national icon, you print the legend even in "fragments and scraps." With Beata Tyszkiewicz, Witold Holtz, Malgorzata Potocka, and Bogumil Kobiela.
--- Fernando F. Croce |