How to Be Loved

How to Be Loved (1963) is Wojciech Has's Polish drama, available to watch online on iFILM. On a flight from Warsaw to Paris, an aging actress named Felicja turns the war years over in her mind.

Under the German occupation she walked away from the stage and buried herself in café work, while for five years she hid a fellow actor, Wiktor, in her room — the man she loved. Wrongly branded the killer of a collaborator, he had been sentenced to death in absentia. Felicja gives up everything for him, her dignity included, and her devotion goes quietly unanswered; the man she saves takes it all for granted.

Has made this a year before his celebrated Saragossa Manuscript, and the same drifting weave of memory is here, the past bleeding into the present. Barbara Krafftówna's Felicja ranks among the great performances in Polish cinema, with Zbigniew Cybulski — the star of Ashes and Diamonds — opposite her. A bitter study of love that can never be earned. Stream How to Be Loved (1963) online on iFILM.