How to Be Loved

A woman sits on an aeroplane travelling from Paris to Warsaw. She talks to herself through the flight. For years she has voiced the same part in a radio serial and everyone knows her by that voice. What she describes belongs to the war: she hid the man she loved, an actor, in her flat. He was accused of killing a German officer and was being hunted. She kept him in her flat for two years. What she did to survive that period, and how she was treated after the war, is the real subject. Wojciech Has directs. Barbara Krafftówna plays the woman. The narrative is built entirely on returns to the past, carried by her interior voice; it moves constantly between the present on the plane and the war. The subject is not heroism but whose benefit an account of heroism is built for. She saved the man and received nothing; what was said about her after the war is something else entirely. Has's manner here is measured; instead of the formal games of his later films there is a tight narrative. Barbara Krafftówna's performance is among the most remembered in Polish cinema. How accusations of collaboration worked in the postwar period stands directly inside the narrative. Who it is for: viewers who follow Polish cinema and narratives of postwar reckoning. Who it is not for: the structure jumps, the tone is heavy, and the narrative offers no consolation.