In the mid-sixties, Jerzy Skolimowski was the enfant terrible of the Polish cinema; he has been working outside of Poland for some fifteen years, but his sensibilities have not strayed very far from home. His latest British feature, Success Is the Best Revenge, picks up where the 1982 film Moonlighting left off in treating the theme of exile. Where the earlier film was a black comedy about four Polish guest-workers trying to rebuild a London townhouse on shaky foundations, Success...is equally absurd, even more fantastic, yet for the filmmaker, perhaps more to the point. For its hero, Alex Rodak, played by a manic Michael York, is another aging enfant terrible, a wild man of the Polish theater working in London on a spectacular “exile show” designed to give the British hands-on experience with the situation in Poland. (The “happening” involves busing audiences into the center of an armed confrontation between demonstrators and police.) Skolimowski's heroes are sometimes carried away with romantic notions of action (like sliding down a ski jump on a suitcase in Barrier) and Rodak's plan only confirms the worst suspicions of his wife (Joanna Szczerbic) and financial backer (John Hurt): that he is determined to burn any bridges to reality, and Poland, that still exist for him. Meanwhile, his son (played by co-writer Michael Lyndon), tired of being an actor in his father's “statement,” pulls the most theatrical punch of all by returning to a reality his father long ago left behind.