Before he tampered with Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot in Mad Love, Andrzej Zulawski made The Public Woman, a startling, indirect adaptation of another work by the same author—namely, the white-hot political tale of terror and conviction, The Possessed. (Wajda would adapt the same book in France in 1988!)
Rather than taking the novel’s plot at face value, Zulawski embedded it in a postmodern frame of reference, telling a story of an actress playing in a film adaptation of Dostoyevsky and being consumed by two on-set relationships: one with the movie’s Svengali-like director, the other with a poor and radical Czech immigrant terrorist. Valérie Kaprisky gives an animated performance that includes notable portions of hyper-energetic naked dancing, while Francis Huster (as her director-cum-Pygmalion) manages to be both carnal and otherworldly. Watched together with Everything for Sale, the film reveals Żuławski as Wajda’s opposite number in his philosophy of film directing. While Wajda was always focused on the communal aspect of making a film, for Żuławski a film set was rarely less than an arena of soul-crushing spiritual struggle, in which the bodies and urges of people involved interacted in ways both magical, carnal and sublime.
