When asked what the grounds for Sweet Rush was based upon, legendary polish director Andrzej Wajda replied that he was searching for a strong female character. In my opinion what he found was not so much a strong female character, but a strong (and very good) actress. Krystyna Janda, of whom he worked with first in Man of Marble (1977) was asked to do the role. She had recently lost her husband in lung cancer.

This fact is made clear from the start and then throughout. Perhaps not entirely from well acting but mainly because Wajda treats us to double narratives of sorts, where one is completely unrelated to the plot and features Janda discussing her own experiences during the hard times in a desolate hotel room. Those double narratives are not optimal and derives too much from the otherwise well executed short story of love and death in a small polish town sometime after world war 2. It saddens me, but to make a small quote from the Slant review to demonstrate my point: after all, how seriously are we to take the central narrative when the director cuts away in the middle of the climactic sequence to give us shots of the camera crew filming the scene?

Andrzej Wajda has always been a favorite of mine. Ashes of Diamonds is really magnificent. Unfortunately I can’t say the same for Sweet Rush. Wajda was granted an honorary price at the Academy Awards last year for remarkable accomplishments in film. A year before that his feature “Katyn” was nominated for best foreign film. I remember watching the awards and in one of the cases it was suggested that Katyn would be his last film, and it would have been a worthy one, too. Evidently Sweet Rush is too much of a personal film for Wajda and Janda themselves, I think.