21 JUNE 1969, Page 25

Wajda in search of a character

ARTS

PENELOPE HOUSTON

Zbigniew Cybulski, Polish film actor. Born in 1927; accidentally killed (he fell under a train he was trying to jump) in 1967. In 1958, in Andrzej Wajda's Ashes and Dia- monds, he had played one of those parts which seem to leap out of a film to be annexed by a generation: leather jacket, dark glasses, the restlessly irresolute hero, Poland's James Dean. And after that, what? Cybulski extended his range, collected man- nerisms, thickened towards middle age, a legend in search of a role to play. Andrzej Wajda has for years looked like a film- maker struggling to find a subject. Now comes the cruellest irony: Cybulski dead, and Wajda in Everything for Sale.(Academy Three, 'A') finding his theme at last—finding it in a film about the tantalising impossi- bility of making a film about the actor— and producing his most important work since his trilogy of a decade ago.

At the beginning of Everything for Sale, the actor (they never name him as Cybulski, which adds to the film's twisted magic) is merely missing: lost, irresponsible, refusing to be his age, off somewhere on a spree. The director stands in for him in a scene from the film within the film—the shot of a man falling under a train. It is only after the run- ning figure has slipped and gone under the wheels and dragged himself up to the plat- form again that the audience realises it is watching something doubly staged for the camera. And as the film unit maliciously argue about their missing star and desul- torily look for him, Everything for Sale keeps slipping between its levels of reality and appearance.

The film director is played by an actor, Andrzej Lapicki, but his wife in the film, Beata Tyszkiewicz, is in real life the wife of . the real director, Andrzej Wajda; the young actor shown as both resenting and looking for an identification with Cybulski, Daniel Olbrychski, has in fact become his successor with Polish audiences. Wajda's technique accepts all the ulcerating ten- sions: the 'real' dialogue between two nervily jealous actresses slides into a scene from the film inside the film, only a little more heightened, a little more hazily staged. One of the actresses slashes her wrists— and the camera slips backwards and there's the film unit in the shot.

A trick, of course, a kind of vertiginous play with appearances; but the justification of tricks is whether they work, and here the blurring of outlines between shades of illu- sion becomes not merely a method of staging but a whole theme. Over a car radio, while galloping horses thunder past, they hear that the actor is dead: the lost hero, the lost leader. And in the second half of the film, the people who knew the real man, and perhaps knew him too well for com- fort, wander exasperatedly in search of his legend. The rapacity of art takes over. Now they need to build their film around a demanding ghost.

The process is no less sophisticated. and much crueller, than Fellini's 84-. Per- haps the film about the film they can't make is something other directors ought to try: it certainly releases some ferocious tensions and home truths. When the director cuts his head after a jolting car stop, he's in-

stantly out of the car photographing his bleeding face—a masochistic enough com- ment on life for art, compounded by our awareness that all that 'real' blood has any- how been streaked on by the make-up department. Black-clad actors are caught walking in glum procession; but they are only following a trolley carrying tins of film, and the newsreel of a friend's funeral is now only material to be scavenged for its dramatic impact.

There is a lacerating and rather sinister self-indulgence in these scenes, and a sug- gestion that everyone is being forced into their double standards. The people in the film unit on the screen aren't finding it easy, and the people in the real film unit can't have found it any easier. But what drives them is not an act of piety (the portrait of Cybulski that emerges is as equivocal as everything else), nor the pressure they keep talking about to make a 'festival film', but a compulsive dissection of disillusionment. What went wrong with the dazzling hopes of Polish cinema ten years ago? Where's the glory now? Out on a snowy plain, the Teu- tonic Knights are pounding about on horse- back, as they keep doing in traditional Polish films. At a movie party in Warsaw everyone is being trendy and tiresome and Italianate. And Cybulski, ten years ago the symbol of something else, is dead under a train.

But this very local and special concern doesn't, as it happens, reduce the film's im- pact. Obviously it helps to know that the edgy scene in which actor and assistant director set light to their vodka glasses in a bar is an ironic recapitulation of a famous incident from Ashes and Diamonds, and that the man who glances so sceptically down the bar at them played in the original with Cybulski. But it isn't essential. The acrid, stinging quality of this Pirandellian search for lost identities as well as lost leaders would survive, I hope, a total lack of acquaintance with Cybulski on the screen. And the frozen imagery, of snow and caked ice, cars jolting along barren roads, sudden dazzling sun, galloping horses, all that Polish baroque contrasted with the wan, tired faces of the film unit, adds its own dimension of illusion-reality. The whole film crackles with a painful electricity. And it rides over some very hard-packed ironies: `Tell him he'll miss me yet' is supposed to have been one of Cybulski's last messages to his former director.

There is an inconsequential little scene in A Place for Lovers (New Victoria and Cine- centa, ,'X') in which Faye Dunaway is making up to a hound she has just rescued from the Italian dog-catching patrol wagon: and with a rather sickening jolt one is reminded of the old man in Umberto D. and his devoted dog and his neo-realist ramblings. Vittorio de Sica directed both films, Cesare Zavattini wrote them (this one with four collabora- tors, including Antonioni's writer, Tonino Guerra), and it is all as distressing as though Dickens had taken it into his head to turn into Ouida. Faye Dunaway's rich girl slopes about, draping herself against bits of villa, sighing and smiling and dying of the sort of beautiful sickness only known to the movies. Marcello Mastroianni toils spaniel-

like after her, looking very harassed indeed at having to deliver deathless clichés in English broken beyond repair. All is leth- argy, inanity, a yawning prettiness. A place for lovers: a vacuum.

Once There Was a War (Paris-Pullman, 'X') is yet another account of adolescence remembered : little boy trying to be a big boy, hanging infatuated around his older sister's friends, and being called to order by reminders that he hasn't done his home- work. Palle Kjaerulff-Schmidt directs it as a scrapbook of amiable, unstressed incident, with the sort of truth to common denomina- tors of life that keeps one acknowledging verisimilitude while still wanting something more.