Magill's Survey of Cinema; 6/15/1995

Andrzej Wajda, the doyen of Polish cinema, turns his attention in EVERYTHING FOR SALE to a subject unusual for Eastern European filmmaking, the relationship between the lives of the director and performers and their art. This feature is one of a group of films that have been titled ``self-referential'' since they deal with the nature of filmmaking and the personality of the director; Federico Fellini's OTTO E MEZZO (1963; EIGHT AND A HALF) may be the best-known of this group of films. Scenes in front of the camera are revealed as make-believe as the half-light from klieg lights reveals the camera, crew, and technicians, as well as the performers. This tension between reality and illusion, truth and falsehood has an added dimension in EVERYTHING FOR SALE because the film was inspired by the death of Zbigniew Cybulski. The star of Wajda's POPIOL I DIAMENT (1958; ASHES AND DIAMONDS) and a pivotal figure in the Polish film world, Cybulski died in early 1967 when attempting to catch a train. Late for an appointment, as was his habit, he tried to hop aboard and fell to his death. EVERYTHING FOR SALE opens with exactly such a scene, as the viewer watches a man running from a bus onto a train station platform, where he tries to board a departing train. Immediately following the screams of onlookers, the entire sequence is revealed as part of a film being made, which explains in retrospect why the man appears to be the only passenger on the bus and platform amid clouds of steam. Since many of the performers in the film knew Cybulski, the film provides an intriguing look into the close world of the Polish cinema, as well as an examination of the motivation behind filmmaking by Poland's foremost director.

The accident victim is being portrayed by the film director, Andrzej (Andrzej Lapicki), since the major performer whose name is never mentioned has characteristically failed to appear for the day's shooting and his whereabouts are unknown. One also learns through backstage conversations that a young actor, Daniel (Daniel Olbrychski), has thoughts of replacing the missing actor but seems reluctant to admit it openly or to face it himself. He is characterized as a former athlete whose film roles have generally been in costume dramas; in fact, Olbrychski did appear in historical epics, including Wajda's film about the Napoleonic Wars, POPIOLY (1965; ASHES). Daniel is not the only person whose life is linked to that of the missing actor. Beata (Beata Tyszkiewicz) and Elzbieta (Elzbieta Czyzewska) are in the volatile situation of being the actor's former lover and current wife respectively. Beata, moreover, is married to the director, Andrzej, and seems to excite Elzbieta's jealousy. Both women are also uneasy about being in a film that deals with the details of their personal lives. Throughout these scenes, the references are studded with double meanings, one for the film-within-the-film and another for the dead Cybulski. During a tense conversation between Daniel and the assistant director (Witold Holtz), the hints of real life are tantalizingly apparent. The assistant director actually held that position under Wajda, and Daniel is practicing his swordmanship (Olbrychski did his own stunts), while in the corner of the scene lies a large, blown up photograph of Cybulski. Highlighting the irony, their conversation revolves around Daniel's personality in the light of the missing performer's behavior.

Another theme in the film is the commentary on the lives of the people who make up the film industry. EVERYTHING FOR SALE includes a number of scenes dealing with this subject. There is a brief procession of actresses in very fashionable clothes as they walk and pose for the camera amid the dismal landscape of a rural apartment block. The visual irony continues in another sequence that depicts Beata and Elzbieta signing for and counting their earnings for the day's shooting. What gives this scene its power is that the pay is for the filming of Elzbieta's attempted suicide: Following a barbed conversation between the two actresses about their relationship to the major actor, Elzbieta goes into the bathroom and slashes her wrist with a razor blade. The suicide sequence is filmed in medium close-up but with pastel colors and extremely soft focus and lighting. She wanders out of the bathroom with her bleeding arm aloft, and only then are the camera and lights of a stage set made visible. After receiving their pay, the performers, director, and crew go off to a fashionable party suggested by the odd procession of well-dressed ladies through the apartment block.

The party itself is an interesting comment on life in late 1960's Poland. Many of the women are filmed in the manner of fashion advertisements, while the centerpiece is a huge table loaded with food and drink, in itself a revealing piece of stage setting for the average Polish audience. Another disturbing feature is that no one is quite dancing with anyone else; a modestly dressed Elzbieta goes through the motions of a dance, but with whom it is never quite clear. Later, she literally steps out of a closet dressed in a clinging, lacy dress and discovers Andrzej brooding alone in a nearby room. It seems that she intends to seduce the director, perhaps out of anger with Beata, until she declares that she wants him to make everyone love her, perhaps the eternal dream of every ingenue. Comically, a screenwriter has been taking down the conversation and insists that they use it in the film being produced.

The party is deemed a failure, and the guests leave, but, eager for diversions, they come across a carnival ride and take their seats on it. Vexed, Elzbieta starts the machinery and laughs uproariously as the guests start spinning through the air like decadent angels. Her laugh is a truly evocative mixture of girlish delight and malicious humor as they plead with her to stop the ride. Oddly, a similar carnival device was featured as part of a set in Wajda's first film, POKOLENIE (1955; GENERATION), but its riders were troops of the German Occupation. Andrzej soon spots Elzbieta and takes her on a drive through the wintry countryside. Braking abruptly, he hits his head on the windshield, and two lines of blood trickle down his face. While Elzbieta goes to moisten a cloth in a nearby stream, Andrzej's self-absorption drives him to take still photographs of his bloodied face.

The search for the missing actor resumes when Beata and Elzbieta learn that he had been to a rural youth club for a poetry reading. The old taxi driver who tells them this seems to be one of the many people charmed by the actor. Having no money for the fare, the actor left the driver with a Polish youth badge, and Cybulski had indeed been given the Golden Badge of the Polish Student Association. Elzbieta meets with the youth club director, who complains good-humoredly of the actor's being late for the reading and says that he left with a club member, a young girl. While driving to catch up with him, Beata, Elzbieta, and the young girl (Malgorzata Potocka) hear over the radio of his death in a train accident.

At the site of the death, a rural railway crossing, they meet Daniel, who leaps from a passing train in a partial reenactment of both the real and fictional death. On the ground, he finds a German SS mug, a token of Cybulski's wartime Resistance activity and the fictional character's as well, and hides it in his jacket. The points of contact between Daniel and the dead man accumulate at an alarming rate. He bribes his way into a fancy nightclub and is given the same black leather jacket to wear that had been loaned to the unnamed actor. In a makeshift memorial, Daniel ignites a glass of vodka, in a gesture well-known from Cybulski's role in ASHES AND DIAMONDS, and when the assistant director baits Daniel with these borrowings from the dead, Daniel clips him on the jaw.

Daniel is deeply distressed by his dilemma and tries to return to the world of sports. Going through his paces over a familiar track, he is dismayed to learn that he can no longer return to the profession of athlete. Seemingly fated to follow in the dead man's steps, he tries to discover the truth behind the tales of the dead actor's SS mug, his Resistance work, and a clandestine trip to wartime Berlin. Daniel is rewarded for his efforts; a forester (Tadeusz Kalinowski) tells him that the stories are all true, that the actor went to Berlin to get roses for a girlfriend.

Andrzej, too, has been looking for people who remember incidents from the dead man's life, particularly the rough outline of a story idea. Traveling by helicopter to the set of a historical epic being filmed, Andrzej is soon surrounded by horsemen in medieval uniforms while he talks to a stagehand. The story is dreadfully banal, about a doomed love between a Polish emigre and a Parisian prostitute, but the setting is unique. On an icy plain, a small army of cavalry enacts a favorite Polish fantasy, the mounted charge of lancers, while a film director extracts material for his production. The imagery would seem singularly Wajda's, since he himself comes from a family molded by the traditions of the Polish cavalry, in which his father was an officer.

Near the film's close, the accident is being restaged at the junction where it occurred, and on hand is the young girl who had last seen the dead man alive. Now, for the purposes of the feature film, her hair has been stylishly redone and the tension between her and Elzbieta is visible in between takes. Daniel is even asked to confirm if the red dye resembles the actual blood stains after the accident. Amid this routine, Daniel spies a herd of cavalry horses from the nearby stud farm and runs to join them. He is gleefully running alongside the herd, when Andrzej and the crew start filming it. Even Daniel's purest joy seems doomed to become part of a film about another's life and death.

Andrzej, too, seems to have learned a few uncomfortable truths about himself - above all, that he cares only about dead people, dead causes, and dead problems. When he has the camera turned to Daniel and the galloping herd, perhaps it is a reversal of that obsession. Many of Wajda's films have wartime or immediately postwar settings. The Polish film critic Boleslaw Michalek felt that EVERYTHING FOR SALE was a chance for some ``thorough heart-searching.'' Indeed, following this film, Wajda made features with more contemporary settings, POLOWANIE NA MUCHY (1969; HUNTING FLIES), BEZ ZNIECZULENIA (1978; WITHOUT ANESTHESIA), and CZLOWIEK Z ZELEZA (1981; MAN OF IRON) most notably. As a creative and collaborative endeavor, filmmaking would seem to mix the tragic with the banal, the most personal with the abstractly universal, drawing on the energies of people motivated by any number of impulses; EVERYTHING FOR SALE illustrates this set of truths.

Review Sources:
Film Quarterly: XXIII, Winter, 1969, p.3
Films and Filming: XV, September, 1969, p.5
Sight and Sound: XXXVIII, Summer, 1969, p.13
Variety: CCLIV, January 1, 1969

Notes: Some Polish film critics view EVERYTHING FOR SALE as a transitional, heart-searching effort for Wajda. Many of his earlier films had wartime settings; following this self-referential film, he made features with more contemporary settings.