[Everything for Sale] is both public and private, a memorial to the dead actor [Zbigniew Cybulski], a personal testament of the director and, crucially, a work which shatters the artistic fetters which have bound Wajda throughout his career. Feeding both on reality and on film, Everything for Sale is Wajda's meditation on a theme, illusion and reality…. At one blow he has matured from an extremely interesting, visually exciting artist whose work was fully comprehensible only in the Polish context to an international artist who happens to be Polish. (p. 139)

[The very general question of illusion and reality appears in different terms throughout the film.] However, the most central expression of the appearance/reality theme is in terms of the truth or falsity of emotion, or, put in abstract, antinomic terms, whether life or art is the more important. (p. 140)

The abstract implication of the theme, the polarity...