I don’t think that “Niewinni czarodzieje” (Innocent Sorcerers, 1960, written by Jerzy Skolimowski, directed by Andrzej Wadja) is a great film. I find its protagonist — a sports physician named Bazyli, who is also the drummer of a jazz ensemble — played by the alarmingly platinum-blond Tadeusz Lomnicki (the lead in Wajda’ “A Generation” (Pokolenie), and the tailor in the first installment of the “Dekalog”) not just unsympathetic but uninteresting. The “Polish James Dean,” Zbigniew Cybulski (star of Wajda’s “Ashes and Diamonds”) has a smaller part as Edmund that is also not very sympathetic or very interesting.
Both of them are eager to seduce Pelagia (Krystyna Stypulkowska, who only appeared in three movies, of which this was the first). She chooses Bazyli and toys with him through a night. They play a particularly boring game in which the winner of each round (of flipping a matchbox) commands the loser to remove an item of clothes. Surprisingly, there is a payoff. I admire how Wajda set it up and also a disgruntled boxer (played by Jerzy Skolimowski) whom Bazyli refused to allow in the ring.
“Innocent Sorcerers” turned out to be one of those movies that are more satisfying after watching than while watching — though these are movies that viewers may abandon part way through.
Roman Polanski plays one of Bazyli’s buddies (a group as aimless as the youth in Fellini’s “I Vitelloni”). Bazyli does not seem to like his buddies other than (possibly) Edmund, but is not as detached as Ethan Hawke is in “Before Sunrise,” Richard Linklater’s more recent exploration of an urban night involving a pickup that is not a “zipless fuck.”
The cool jazz score by Krzysztof Komeda (who went on to score several Polanski movies, including “Rosemary’s Baby” before an early death, and who is one of the buddies in the film) is quite good, reminiscent of Miles Davis’s score for “Elevator to the Gallows” (though not featuring a trumpeter).
The transfer or the original print was not that good, though “Innocent Sorcerers” does not have much in the way of striking visual compositions to compromise (at least after the opening credits sequence of graphic art). There are no DVD bonus features. Given that Wajda usually had interesting things to say about his earlier films on other DVDs, this is disappointing. He might have convinced me that the film is better than I thought even after my estimation rose with the sun during the film! Perhaps there is a political subtext in this portrayal of a certain Bohemian life in Warsaw ca. 1960 that I missed.
“Innocent Sorcerers” may be the place to start with the films of Jerzy Skolimowski. The place to start with Wajda films is the trilogy of films set around the end of World War II in Warsaw.
©2008, 2018, Stephen O. Murray
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