Born into an aristocratic family that he despises, Paweł (Tadeusz Janczar) impulsively runs off with taxi dancer Lidka (Maria Wachowiak), a fiercely independent-minded woman who knows how to put him and any other man firmly in his place; their romance is unsurprisingly short-lived. Soon afterwards, the Nazis invade Poland, Paweł ends up in Auschwitz, and he and Lidka meet again five years later in a completely different, war-ravaged environment, albeit one where the old Polish aristocracy is still clinging to old traditions and Lidka has since married into it. Has’s film fully captures the irony of Stanisław Dygat’s celebrated 1948 novel.
