The Wedding is a visually stunning rendition of Stanislaw Wyspianski’s celebrated turn-of-the-century play, inspired by a real-life wedding between a fashionable poet (Olbrychski, in one of his finest roles) and a farmer’s daughter. While Wajda’s adaptation dispenses with the language of the original theatrical piece, the film vividly animates the playwright’s allegorical vision, in which an admixture of people from every station calls forth figures drawn from both Polish history and legend to create a bittersweet self-examination of the national character—both its aspirations and its flaws.