Ashes and Diamonds

Andrej Wajda, Poland, 1958, 104 minutes

Zbigniew Cybulski, the 'Polish James Dean' is the central presence in the concluding chapter of Andrzej Wajda's trilogy about the effects of World War II on his own generation. Cybulski plays a young resistance fighter who, after a bungled mission, must wait in a small town hotel to assassinate the communist official who was his original target. In the meantime Cybulski engages a barmaid in an affair which forces him to question his clandestine lifestyle and the cost of his commitment to 'the cause'. The political banquet at the same hotel neatly permits Wajda the opportunity to generate a critical and frequently parodic portrayal of the aspirant toadies and money-grabbing bureaucrats who had come to represent the 'new Poland'.

Nevertheless, Ashes and Diamonds never becomes a depressing exercise in political finger-pointing. It is often visually spectacular, brilliant lighting effects and arrangement of mise-en-scene creating several truly memorable moments such as the conversation in a bombed-out church or the wounded Cybulski fleeing through a courtyard of washing lines hung with billowing white sheets. Through Ashes and Diamonds Wajda mangages to present a story which both convincingly evokes Poland's first days after the war and exposes the ultimately tragic core of both Cybulski and the barmaid's situations.

Review by Iain Harral
Taken from EUFS Programme 1995-96