Starring: Zbigniew Cybulski, Teresa Tuszyńska, Roman Polański, Jacek Fedorowicz
Directed by: Janusz Morgenstern
Despite having served brilliantly as Andrzej Wajda’s assistant director in the 1950s, Janusz Morgenstern seemed stuck in the role of sidekick. He had two screenplays rejected before he was allowed to direct his own feature in 1960. Do widzenia do jutra (Goodbye, Until Tomorrow) and Wajda’s Niewinni czarodzieje (Innocent Sorcerers) demonstrated that Polish cinema was finally able to put aside the demons of war. At the turn of the decade, it shifted its focus to the concerns of the post-war generation.
Together with ‘Bim-Bom’ troupe members Bogumił Kobiela and Zbigniew Cybulski, Morgenstern penned the dialogue for a love affair between an angry young actor Jacek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Marguerite (Teresa Tuszyńska), the daughter of a foreign diplomat. The character of Marguerite was based on Françoise Buron, the one time muse of the Gdańsk-based Bim-Bom troupe. Morgenstern’s debut also made room for a cameo by Roman Polański, who attempts to hit on a foreign girl by displaying his fluent French on a tennis court.
Morgenstern never tried to imitate the greatest European auteurs. The ontological isolation experienced by Jacek and Marguerite in the sequence set among the aisles of St. Mary’s Church, however, echoes Rossellini’s cinema. Morgenstern’s characters lack the vital and yuppi-esque cynicism displayed by Wajda’s golden boys, but the emotional charge of their melancholy has not faded over time.
Originally published by The Krakow Post on August 23, 2012