While The Noose (1957) was set in the then present and Farewells (1958) in 1939 and 1944, Wojciech Has’s third feature One Room Tenants (also known as Roomers and Roommates) goes back further, to the multicultural melting-pot that was early 1930s Warsaw, with particular attention paid to its since-vanished Jewish community. This was the first clear sign in one of his films of what would become such a recurring interest (particularly apparent in 1973’s The Hourglass Sanatorium) that it was widely assumed that Has must have had Jewish ancestry. Although this appears not to have been the case; he merely had a life-long fascination with the culture, vividly reconstructed here both in exterior and interior spaces (a Jewish-run café hosts one of the first prolonged conversations).
At least seven people occupy the single room in Sarg Street being rented out by the landlady Mrs Stukonisowa (Irena Netto, who played a near-identical part in Farewells), although it’s not always easy to distinguish between residents and regular visitors. Her two sons, aspiring poet Zygmunt (Adam Pawlikowski, a familiar face from late-1950s Polish cinema; he was also in Farewells and Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds) and Communist activist Mieciek (Ryszard Pietruski) are among the tenants, as are new arrival Lucjan Salis (Mieczysław Gajda), law student Józef Bednarczyk (Zdzisław Maklakiewicz), and an unnamed medical student (Krzysztof Litwin) who’s the brother of Teodozja (Beata Tyszkiewicz), who shares a barely cordoned-off space to the side with Felicja (Zuzanna Helska).
Despite the mixed company, there’s pretty much no privacy (the room is only ever partitioned with hanging washing), with the tenants casually using each other’s property from the off, much to Lucjan’s visible discomfiture. Some of them work, usually out of short-term financial necessity, but most are students and/or self-styled intellectuals, sporting lofty creative/philosophical ambitions that seem unmatched by visible willingness to put any effort into achieving them beyond scribbling trite aphorisms like ‘What will become of us? We are God’s ankle weights’. Instead, they behave like Parisian flâneurs or American beatniks, strolling around Warsaw affecting an air of sophistication, which their friend Dziadzia (a scene-stealing Gustaw Holoubek, in his third consecutive Has film) has attempted to realise in physical form via a beard so ostentatiously sculpted that a middle-aged female acquaintance asks him if it has a specifically erotic purpose. The same may be true of his incongruous straw boater and long-stemmed pipe; this is a man who firmly believes in dressing to impress, even if the impression that he actually gives is some distance removed from what was presumably intended.
In fact, the men generally seem fearful of anything erotic; at an early stage Lucjan looks distinctly uncomfortable as the medical student tells him a steamy anecdote. Miłosz Stelmach has noted that the more sexually explicit aspects of Zbigniew Uniłowski’s 1932 source novel were substantially toned down, but suggests that this was only partly due to late 1950s film censorship codes – he also claims that Has and co-writer Stanisław Dygat (author of the source novel that fuelled Farewells) were more interested in depicting existential crises than reproducing the novel’s all-out realism. Lucjan attempts a hesitant romance with Teodozja, but it unsurprisingly gets nowhere, while Miss Leopard (Anna Łubieńska, so nicknamed on account of her preferred form of fur coat) allegedly insisted that any affair with Dziadzia be strictly platonic – or, to use her quoted term, ‘metaphysical’. (Although we learn very quickly indeed that if Dziadzia is the sole source of a particular story, its veracity is to be regarded with immediate suspicion.) And when Miss Leopard unexpectedly reciprocates Lucjan’s apparent interest in her, at least on a physical level, he immediately tries to back out of it by nonchalantly claiming ‘I did it out of boredom’.
As in The Noose, images of clocks, the sound of them ticking, and the abiding impression of inexorably passing time cast a long shadow over the proceedings, with everyone conscious that their own time may be running out – literally in two cases, as not everyone will make it to the end alive. (In the opening scene, Lucjan reads out a quotation, ‘Time is passing, it won’t stop. That fact scares even the clock.’) In his writing on the film, Stelmach quotes the film critic Maria Kornatowska, ‘Death is the fundamental subject for Has, starting with The Noose, his debut, through to The Tribulations of Balthazar Kober [his last film]. We deal here with the death of a character, an era, and a certain world. His films seem to be about something, the characters move in a particular direction, have their desires and pursuits. In reality, however, from the very first shot, they belong to the land of the dead. Their fate is doomed.’ Which pessimistic but evidence-backed assessment can apply just as much to those left alive at the end, as they’ll have been made fully aware of the essential pointlessness of their existence.
In terms of mise-en-scène, Has continues the approach already on display in The Noose and Farewells: long, flowing takes, with much use of Wellesian deep focus (like his almost exact contemporary Andrzej Wajda, Has revered Citizen Kane, and would later make a point of screening it to students when teaching at the Łódź Film School). As ever, the film was meticulously storyboarded in advance, which amongst other things led to some beautifully judged dissolves. This was the first Has film to be lit by Stefan Matyjaszkiewicz, who cut his professional teeth as camera operator for Wajda and who would subsequently shoot most of Has’ films over the next few years. The music is almost invariably diegetic, played in cafés and nightclubs or simply overheard being casually performed in Sarg Street by an itinerant violinist or accordionist. If the characters in One Room Tenants seem perpetually unsure about where their lives are heading, this is emphatically not true of their director, whose steely control of the material rivets the attention even when the narrative is at its most lackadaisically diffuse.
Michael Brooke, season curator
One Room Tenants Wspólny pokój
Director: Wojciech Jerzy Has
Production Company: Zespol Filmowy ‘Kamera’
Screenplay: Wojciech Jerzy Has, Stanisław Dygat
Based on the novel by: Zbigniew Uniłowski
Director of Photography: Stefan Matyjaszkiewicz
Editor: Zofia Dwornik
Art Directors: Jerzy Skarzynski, Wojciech Krysztofiak
Costume Designers: Jerzy Skarzynski, Alicja Waltos
Music: Lucjan Kaszycki
Sound: Bohdan Bienkowski, Jan Kalisz
Cast
Mieczysław Gajda (Lucjan Salis)
Gustaw Holoubek (Dziadzia)
Adam Pawlikowski (Zygmunt Stukonis)
Ryszard Pietruski (Mieciek)
Anna Łubieńska (Miss Leopard)
Beata Tyszkiewicz (Teodozja)
Irena Netto (Mrs Stukonisowa)
Zdzisław Maklakiewicz (Józef Bednarczyk)
Halina Buyno (neighbour)
Zuzanna Helska (Felicja)
Krzysztof Litwin
Poland 1959
94 mins
Digital (restoration)
In cultural partnership with
This retrospective is presented in partnership with the ICA, which will also be hosting exclusive screenings of Has’ works.
The 23rd Kinoteka Polish Film Festival is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025.
Organised by
All restorations by
All films courtesy of
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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