The title of Wojciech Has’s second feature is given in the plural – appropriately, because there are numerous farewells threaded throughout its length. Some farewells are bid between people, others to an undesirable situation that’s been put behind them, and still others on a wider national scale; to Poland prior to WWII (the first part of the film is set in 1939) and to the end of Nazi occupation and anticipation of what might come afterwards (the second part is set at the turn of 1944-45).
Tadeusz Janczar plays Paweł, the male lead, having already established himself as a one-man anthem for Polish doomed youth in Andrzej Wajda’s A Generation (1955) and Kanał (1957) – and he was a credible front-runner for the lead in Ashes and Diamonds (1958) too, only Wajda decided to gamble on Zbigniew Cybulski instead. Born into an aristocratic family that he heartily despises, Paweł is very clear indeed about what he doesn’t want, but rather vaguer about what he does – and his own father (Zdzisław Mrożewski) defty nails him when he says that he rushes into things only to drop them halfway through. And that observation is made before he impulsively abandons a family meal in favour of a trip to a nightclub of dubious repute.
There, he meets Lidka (Maria Wachowiak), a taxi dancer who has only been in the job for three weeks but that’s more than enough for her to be able to anticipate every last syllable of a chat-up line or similar cliché – indeed, her initial conversation with Paweł is full of swerves and reversals as she evidently can’t decide whether she’s as repulsed by him as she is by her usual partners or unexpectedly intrigued. Fiercely intelligent, she can draw blood with a well-aimed tongue; at one point she says to Paweł ‘I needed someone like you. Something, but not too much of a thing’, and follows this up with ‘Sometimes you sound like a poet. Your words make no sense, but they sound nice’. Later, when she runs into Paweł’s disapproving father, she responds to his suggestion that he pay her off with an immediate, deeply sarcastic and frankly smartarse ‘your son has damaged me to the amount of 2,354 złotys and 17 groszys’.
But they’re intrigued enough by each other to run off together, ending up at the Quo Vadis guesthouse, which Lidka interprets as a sign from Fate. (Her birth name was the fancifully aristocratic Genowefa, which she detested, so she renamed herself Lidia, a modern equivalent of Ligia, heroine of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Quo Vadis.) But the real world soon intrudes, and the match is declared quite hopeless, leading to their initial farewell.
The film then jumps forward just over five years, and an unshaven Paweł is clearly on his uppers: he joined up to fight in 1939, and spent two years at Auschwitz, an experience that he briefly sums up as ‘Humans are blessed with the gift of forgetting. Without it, it would be impossible to keep on living.’ (Another recurring theme, not just in Farewells but threaded through much of Has’s early work, concerns the desirability of bidding farewell to unwanted memories.)
He reluctantly ends up visiting his aunt Waleria (Helena Sokołowska) and finds that his aristocratic relatives are still clinging to the trappings of their pre-war life, complete with dinner-gongs, while trying their best to tune out the signs of German occupation, or other indications that things have turned completely upside down (Waleria’s home is a sanctuary for refugees, judges dig trenches, university professors hawk slices of cake at railway stations). At one point, Waleria asks Paweł if he fought in the very recent Warsaw Uprising, and when he replies that he didn’t, she says that that’s not good; his male ancestors invariably fought in previous uprisings, as it was a sign of their fundamental respect for their beloved Poland. Of course, with hindsight that the film’s original audience would have possessed as well, we know that Paweł’s family would fare no better under the Communists.
Gustaw Holoubek, so riveting as the protagonist of Has’ debut feature The Noose, turns up here as Paweł’s cousin Mirek. Annette Insdorf has observed that Paweł and Mirek are practically doubles – ‘aimless, elegant, and dissolute, and play the piano impressively. They are drawn to Lidka and little else’ – only in this case Mirek has actually married her prior to Paweł’s arrival. (Holoubek would later marry Maria Wachowiak in real life.) This complicates matters somewhat, even if their previous relationship had been decidedly chaste, generating a tension that underpins much of the second half. Not least class tension; Lidka is now known as ‘the Countess’, but Paweł is well aware of her roots.
Farewells was released in Poland just ten days after Ashes and Diamonds, with which it shares several supporting actors and tackles similar themes, albeit from a decidedly more ironic angle. Paweł is no Maciej Chełmicki (the anti-Communist assassin indelibly played by Zbigniew Cybulski); he’s happier to spend days on end lying on a bed in his lodgings just staring at the ceiling, but aloof neutrality is a stance that’s impossible to maintain in this environment – either in Poland as a whole, or under Waleria’s roof.
Indeed, by this stage in the film Poland hadn’t been an independent country for five years, and Has depicts it as a massive transit camp, with many people talking about leaving as quickly as possible – and some eventually do; Paweł’s parents have already decamped to London, while Mirek and Lidka are contemplating Vienna. This attitude would persist long after World War II, with Walerian Borowczyk, Roman Polański and Andrzej Żuławski, the three Polish filmmakers who were arguably closest to Has in their quasi-baroque, quasi-surrealist approach, similarly opting to work abroad for most of their careers – whereas Has would remain in Poland, where he was better placed to examine the complex, conflicting tangle of national memories that underpinned so much of his work.
Michael Brooke, season curator
Farewells (aka Lydia Ate the Apple) Pożegnania
Director: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Production Companies: Zespól Filmowy ‘Syrena’, Film Polski
Producer: Wilhelm Hollender
Screenplay: Wojciech Jerzy Has, Stanislaw Dygat
Based on the novel by: Stanislaw Dygat
Editor: Zofia Dwornik
Set Designer: Roman Wolyniec
Sound: Jozef Kopronowicz
Cast
Tadeusz Janczar (Paweł)
Maria Wachowiak (Lidka)
Gustaw Holoubek (Mirek)
Irena Netto (hotel owner)
Saturnin Zurawski (Felix)
Stanislaw Jaworski (Dr Janowski)
Stanislaw Milski
Zdzisław Mrożewski
Jozef Pierski
Irena Starkowna
Helena Sokołowska
Hanna Skarzanka
Jarema Stepowski
Teresa Gawlikowska (dancer)
Anna Lubienska (night club singer)
Poland 1958
103 mins
Digital (restoration)
In cultural partnership with
This retrospective is presented in partnership with the ICA, which will also be hosting exclusive screenings of Has’ works.
The 23rd Kinoteka Polish Film Festival is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025.
Organised by
All restorations by
All films courtesy of
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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