Film

The Wedding (1972)

Director: Andrzej Wajda

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

In Poland, Stanislaw Wyspianski's verse play The Wedding carries huge historical resonance. First performed in 1901, it deals with the provincial wedding of a peasant girl to an urban poet, at which the guests encounter dramatic figures from Poland's tortured past - a wise court jester, the Black Knight, a ghostly peasant who led a revolt against the gentry in 1848, and so on. Particular significance is attached to a golden horn - a symbol of national mission - that goes missing in the increasingly frenzied proceedings. Wajda goes for all of this with full romantic abandon. The camera swings wildly like a drunken wedding guest, the actors cast caution (and verse speaking) to the winds, and there is a great deal of blood and smoke. Whether you find this bewildering or exhilarating depends on your sympathies for such an extreme approach to a nation's artistic sensibility.

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