"The title of Andrzej Wajda's 1958 film is taken from lines by the Polish Romantic poet Cyprian Norwid: Will there remain among the ashes a star-like diamond, the dawn of eternal victory? They are words imbued with bleak irony and disillusion; a pair of lovers in this movie discover them written in a ravaged church and have difficulty deciphering them, and also cannot decide where their loyalties and future lie as the second world war comes to its chaotic end."
"They consider their mission in no way halted by the end of the war, but they have just grotesquely bungled their latest task of assassinating Communist party apparatchik Szczuka (Wacaw Zastrzezynski); lounging around and sunbathing before the hit, they accidentally kill two innocent young people. Nauseated by his failure, horrified by accidentally witnessing the grief of a young woman engaged to one of his two innocent victims, and realising himself exhausted by the war's end, Maciek is nonetheless ordered by his superiors to try again."
The story opens on VE Day, 8 May 1945, in a provincial Polish town where celebration masks unresolved feelings about the war's end. The title derives from Cyprian Norwid lines about a 'star-like diamond' amid ashes, lines that carry bleak irony and disillusion. A pair of lovers find the lines in a ravaged church and struggle to decipher them while they cannot decide where their loyalties and future lie. Maciek, Andrzej and Drewnowski are Home Army fighters who remain committed to resisting both communists and Nazis. After a bungled assassination attempt kills two innocents, Maciek is ordered to try again and is placed in a hotel room next to his target, Communist apparatchik Szczuka, whose teenage son works with the insurgents.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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