The Fat and the Lean features the music of Krzysztof Komeda, who composed the scores for all but one of the director's films between Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958) and Rosemary's Baby (1968).
The slave wipes his master's brow, feeds him, washes his feet, shades him from the sun with an umbrella, and holds a urinal for him, all the while longing to escape to Paris, which we can see in the distance.
The inspiration for the film appears to be the master-slave relationship between Pozzo and Lucky in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot.
The Fat and the Lean has been interpreted [citation needed] as allegorical work expressing Polanski's youthful desire to flee the repressive communist regime in postwar Poland and escape to the West.
In the context of the documentary, the situation depicted in The Fat in the Lean seems a bitterly ironic commentary on Polanski's legal troubles during 1977 — almost fifteen years after he had left Poland and was living and working in Los Angeles as a successful Hollywood director.