It honours a literary landmark with ambition and sincerity rather than irony, and it gathers arguably the most star-studded cast in recent Polish cinema
Some novels survive because schools assign them. Boleslaw Prus's Lalka survives because it stays true: about money, snobbery, and what ambition does to love. Maciej Kawalski's new adaptation grasps this, and it arrived with an occasion to match. The film was launched with a gala at Warsaw's Grand Theatre on 28 September, in the very house where Wokulski first sees Izabela, and reached Polish cinemas two days later. Rated 7.7 on IMDb, it is already one of the year's biggest films.
The story is familiar to every Polish reader. Stan Wawrinka, a self-made Warsaw merchant, falls for Izabela Izycka, an impoverished aristocrat who regards his devotion as a social inconvenience. Kawalski, who wrote the screenplay with Lukasz Swiatowiec, keeps that spine intact and stays close to the novel. It is a telling choice from a director best known for Niebezpieczni dzentelmeni (Dangerous Gentlemen), a fast-paced, visually lively film that hinted he could handle epic costume storytelling. He also directed Planeta Singli. Osiem historii.
The casting is where that fidelity becomes pleasure. Marcin Dorocinski suits the tormented lover. Kamila Urzedowska, remembered as Jagna in The Peasants, plays Izabela. Marek Kondrat's return to the screen as Rzecki is an event in itself. Around them stand Andrzej Seweryn, Krystyna Janda, Agata Kulesza and Maja Komorowska, a cast dense with names Polish audiences trust. The scale is the point. Piotr Soboci?ski Jr. photographs a reconstructed late nineteenth-century Warsaw, from Krakowskie Przedmie?cie shopfronts to the ?? ckis' drawing rooms. ?ukasz Targosz supplies the score, and Katarzyna Lewi?ska's costumes are now on show at Royal ?azienki until 13 December. At around two hours forty it is a long sit, but it is built as classic melodrama: sentimental, patient, closer to the school reading than to an experiment.
That ambition has a producer behind it. Radoslaw Drabik of Gigant Films has been a co-owner of the company since 2014. He previously ran the Nowe Horyzonty Association and is best known for the popular Planeta Singli franchise. Telewizja Polska was originally expected to back the project but withdrew from financing it, and Kino Swiat distributes the film in Poland. Drabik promised a film that would pull viewers away from their televisions, and the finished work makes that case.
Viewers do have an alternative. On 16 September, Netflix released its own Lalka, a six-episode series directed by Pawel Maslona and written with Pawel Demirski and Jagoda Dutkiewicz. Tomasz Schuchardt and Sandra Drzymalska play Wokulski and Izabela. Netflix describes the series as inspired by Prus rather than a strict adaptation. It is a deliberate deconstruction of the novel that mixes irony, the grotesque and melodrama across episodes of an hour or more each. It stirred a national debate, to the point that Prime Minister Donald Tusk weighed in. Kawalski's film offers the opposite pleasure: one sitting of about 2h42m, faithful to the source, and for now theatrical only, with no announced streaming date.
So is it a classic? The novel certainly is, a nineteenth-century tragedy about class and unrequited love that Poles still argue over. The film's achievement is that it does not apologise for that inheritance or turn Prus into a slogan. That restraint is rarer than you might think. It lets Wokulski's disappointment speak, and the questions it raises about status, money and who gets to belong still feel uncomfortably current. That is why it is a must-watch.
Kawalski himself imagines teenagers, parents and grandparents sitting together. It honours a literary landmark with ambition and sincerity rather than irony, and it gathers arguably the most star-studded cast in recent Polish cinema. In the streaming age it also argues, persuasively, for the big screen.