Everything for Sale

Here they are again, our old friends illusion and reality, battling it out to unsettling effect in a film with more layers than an onion and umpteen references to Wajda's own career. A film director called Andrzej tries to continue shooting after his lead (clearly modelled on Zbigniew Cybulski, the actor who became the personification of postwar Polish cinema through his work with Wajda, and who had recently died in tragic circumstances) has disappeared. The result is stylistically and emotionally overwrought, but Wajda's technical assurance helps enormously in maintaining tension.