A young farm boy spends his days dreaming and making totem-pole like sculptures out of wood. His brother is a go-getter: studies agricultural engineering, comes back with diploma to marry the pretty girl next door. The dreamer graces puts his sculptures around, invoking anger of his father and ridicule of the peasants who find him useless. During the brother's wedding he sets his totems ablaze. He makes a pass at his new sister-in-law, but returns to his own reveries. In the end he hears a call to bring a log out of the marshes, but during the escapade sinks into the bog.
A young farm boy spends his days dreaming and making totem-pole like sculptures out of wood. His brother is a go-getter: studies agricultural engineering, comes back with diploma to marry the pretty girl next door. The dreamer graces puts his sculptures around, invoking anger of his father and ridicule of the peasants who find him useless. During the brother's wedding he sets his totems ablaze. He makes a pass at his new sister-in-law, but returns to his own reveries. In the end he hears a call to bring a log out of the marshes, but during the escapade sinks into the bog.
After completing a project, a shipbuilder grows restless and travels the country on his motorcycle. He leaves behind his wife, a woman of virtue and responsibility, as he goes off on his amorous drunken escapades. He is part of a lost generation whose economic and vocational prospects have been severely limited in the decades following World War II. His summer cabin on the Baltic beach is torn apart by drunken revelers to feed a bonfire in this brooding and often depressing film.
After completing a project, a shipbuilder grows restless and travels the country on his motorcycle. He leaves behind his wife, a woman of virtue and responsibility, as he goes off on his amorous drunken escapades. He is part of a lost generation whose economic and vocational prospects have been severely limited in the decades following World War II. His summer cabin on the Baltic beach is torn apart by drunken revelers to feed a bonfire in this brooding and often depressing film.
Wajda's homage to Zbigniew Cybulski, the "Polish James Dean" who starred in the director's ASHES AND DIAMONDS and died young. The movie follows the tribulations of a director attempting to make a movie with a Cybulski-like star who never shows up.
A father searches for his son, who has been missing since WW II, in post-war Poland. In his quest for the truth about his son, the father is forced to contemplate the elusive and coded nature of truth itself.
