How to be Loved

^director Wojciech Jerzy Has
^screenplay Kazimierz Brandys
^{director of photography} Stefan Matyjaszkiewicz
^music ARRANGED BT Lucjan M. Kaszycki
^with Barbara Krafftówna, Zbigniew Cybulski, Artur Młodnicki, Wieńczysław Gliński, Zdzisław Maklakiewicz, Wiesław Gołas, Wiesława Kwaśniewska
^awards
 Golden Gate Award for Best Film, Best Female Role for Barbara Krafftówna and for Best Screenplay at the San Francisco Film Festival, 1963
 FIPRESCI Prize at the International Film Festival in Beirut, 1964
 ’Film’ magazine Readers Award, Golden Duck (Złota Kaczka), 1963

MARIOLA DOPARTOWA, HOW TO BE LOVED, [JAK BYĆ KOCHANĄ], WWW.POLSKASZKOLAFILMOWA.PL

‘How to be Loved’ does not become just a synonym of the phrase: ‘how can love be possible after Auschwitz and Kolyma?’. Its melodramatic storyline shows the process of construing a false consciousness, construing a closed space, of how a man becomes increasingly beset by affairs, emotions and experiences which are not his own. Felicja’s flat becomes a microcosm of the whole wartime reality – with its chaos, lies, fear, violence, defencelessness in confrontation with another man, with an aura of a desperate hunt for the rationale, heroic myths, food, other people. Thus, this formal melodrama serves as a tool of extracting some of the deeply buried truths about those aspects of ‘the night of occupation’ which ended neither with the Second World War, nor with Stalinism. The heroine’s growing up consists in brutal stripping her of successive illusions. Has asks: how was it possible that the process did not end in an eventual sinking into nihilism, did not culminate in putting on a mask of cynicism?

ANDRZEJ WERNER, HISTORY OF THE POLISH FILM, VOL. 5 (1962-1967), ED. BY RAFAŁ MARSZAŁEK [HISTORIA FILMU POLSKIEGO, T. V (1962-1967), POD RED. RAFAŁA MARSZAŁKA], WARSZAWA 1985

In a way, ‘How to be Loved’ is doubly polemical: in relation to everyday notions, but also, in a sense, in relation to ‘the Polish school’. For here – although the defence of the individual caught up in historical necessities and historical generalisations was its strongly exposed element – the measure of individual deeds lay after all outside the individual, regulated by willful reasons, discordant with the run-of-the-mill representations.