Rent Ashes and Diamonds (1958)

Victory, Terms and Conditions Apply - Ashes and Diamonds review by griggs

War films usually end with victory, defeat, or at least the pretence that something has been settled. Ashes and Diamonds starts where those films stop. Nazi Germany has fallen, but Poland isn’t free. The tanks are Russian now: former co-signatories of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the same power that invaded Poland from the east in 1939. Liberation arrives wearing a different uniform. Lovely.

Maciek is the film’s bruised centre. Zbigniew Cybulski plays him like a noir hero who has wandered into history by mistake: cool glasses, frayed nerves, bad orders. Maciek looks less like a soldier and more like a Mod who has accidentally wandered into a civil war, which makes him feel oddly modern. He should be smoking in a café, arguing about jazz, and making terrible romantic decisions. Instead, he is carrying a gun and trying to work out whether the future has room for him.

His brief connection with Krystyna gives the film its ache. For a few hours, an ordinary life seems possible. Then politics taps its watch.

Wajda’s imagery is bold without turning into homework: flaming vodka glasses, the upside-down crucifix, that ghostly white horse.

What stayed with me is the trap. The war is over, but history hasn’t finished with him.

Not Much To Celebrate - Ashes and Diamonds review by NC

1945 meant the beginning of freedom for some countries, but for Poland it only signalled a shift of power from Nazi to Soviet - hardly something to celebrate. Ironic then that much of the film revolves around a party to mark the end of the war, and a local dignitary's promotion. It's a heady cocktail: political expediency by such people as councillors and the military anxious not to rock the boat with their new masters, mixed in with continued resistance, as young Maciek keeps on killing, and thinking little of it, until he meets Krystyna.
Only an expert hand could blend the two contents into a winning formula. There are quite a few reasons for thinking Wajda comes up short. First of all, it's too specialist and particular. Much of what is said in irritatingly long conversations can only be wholly understood by a native audience, or someone learned in Polish history. The rest of us are left to grasp the gist and cling on. There are too many of these longueurs. Secondly, the acting. Maciek needs to show two contrasting sides of his personality: an insouciant assassin, and a young man hitting the wall of an emotion he never before knew existed. Zbigniew Cybulski is nowhere near up to the task. Unbelievably he isn't the worst actor in the film. Bogumil Kobiela, the Danny Kaye lookalike, unfortunately also acts the fool like Kaye, much to the detriment of the serious meaning trying to be conveyed. The lovely Ewa Krzyzewska shows up best, a barmaid hoping to find a chink of light in a drab town and a drab future.
So what's left? There are about half a dozen brilliantly realised, exquisitely photographed scenes worthy of Angelopoulos at his best. But even then, whereas the Greek would dwell on the images, allowing the viewer to float in their beauty, Wajda almost throws them away in next to no time.
Some call this one of world cinema's great films. What a massive disappointment to find it is nothing of the kind.

Taut political thriller - Ashes and Diamonds review by JO

A taut political thriller set in the days immediately after the liberation of Poland in 1944. The country is facing an uncertain future torn between Nationalism and Communism. Wajda's classic Polish film, influenced by Italian Neo-Realist cinema, questions the post war identity of Poland through its anti-hero protagonist.

Maciek, a young soldier in the right-wing Nationalist Army, is ordered to assassinate the newly arrived communist district secretary. The initial attempted assassination is bungled and he winds up killing two innocent civilians. Ordered to try again, Maciek falls hopelessly in love with a girl at the hotel where he and his target are staying. His love for her forces him to question his conscience and the loyalty to his cause. Maciek learns that his lifestyle is meaningless in the new, post war Poland.

An excellent, gripping film with a tour de force performance by Cybulski. The cinematography is gorgeous: every frame is exquisite. Highly recommended.

Fifties Arthouse. - Ashes and Diamonds review by Steve

Andrzej Wajda’s arthouse masterpiece has always been controversial in Poland for its political moderation in an era of conflict and ideology. It is most potent as a lament for a lost generation trapped between the Nazi occupation and Soviet oppression. And for its haunting, poetic imagery.

Zbigniew Cybulski became a legend in Polish cinema for his role as a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising who finds he is being exploited by the leaders of the resistance to seize power while peace is proclaimed. Rather than murder a Communist as commanded, he chooses humanity.

Which Wajda implies, is not an available option. To an outsider, the political intrigue isn’t always engaging. Yet the melancholy romance between the disillusioned partisan and a hotel worker (Ewa Krzyzewska) is heartbreaking, as their lives are ground by the gears of factional opportunism.

Cybulski looks more like a star of the ‘50s than the war, but he gave Polish cinema its James Dean. It’s Krzyzewska and he together who endure, bonded by a brief experience of love which can never be more than a moment of intimate solace within a malign national destiny.