That same year Treliński also returned to the cinema with the feature film Egoiści (The Egoists), a story about the Warsaw artistic and business elite. The film proved scandalous because of its amoral vision of contemporary times, but critics generally remained very reticent. However, ‘independent of Treliński’s intentions as an author’, Mateusz Werner underlined, ‘his film explores very basic issues, without an understanding of which it is impossible to understand the 1990s in Poland – that strange, deviant time when former slaves of a system metamorphosed into free individuals’ (Film, 2001, no. 2).
Treliński himself in an interview with Grzegorz Wojtowicz for Stopklatka.pl said:
This sentence is some kind of key-confession. If we are lonely, we are cursed, because we do not deserve the highest good, love, which awaits us all. My protagonists are drilled people, isolated from the thing that becomes the pure air, breathing and the engine of the all ativities. In the film I suggest that my characters are the ones to blame for their loneliness. They live in trance, in such a mysterious condition of their souls, where everything is allowed, their lives are neverending parties. We are responsible for our own actions, we have chosen this condition. I am blushing when telling such trivial things. We all know we are some halves created to coexist. In case we so wish to live in isolation from love, it is a pathological state and I made a film about this paricular illness.
At the same time, discussions were lively about Treliński’s new opera project, Giuseppe Verdi’s Othello (2001). The director’s operatic offerings began to elicit controversy, and while Treliński already had his loyal viewers who eagerly awaited his next production, he also had staunch detractors.
In 2002 Treliński staged Peter Tchaikovsky’s Eugeniusz Oniegin. Once more he proved capable of transferring emotions inscribed in the music and libretto into contemporary language, which resulted in the creation on stage of a disquieting symbolic reality. The production’s visuals and the staging ideas for certain scenes – including a fashion show during the Polonaise that opens Act III as well as Triquet’s couplets accompanied by a female dancer jumping out of a cake – consciously toyed with the artifice of operatic stagings and were simultaneously ideas that balanced at the edge of kitsch. In this manner Treliński engaged in a dialogue with operatic conventions, underlining their settled and schematic nature while simultaneously offering new solutions. Just as in King Roger, so in Onegin the director introduced a new, mysterious and unspecified character (played by Jan Peszek), designed to represent old Onegin.
In 2002 Treliński, remaining loyal to the National Opera in Warsaw, staged Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni, brilliantly underlining both the serious and jocular tones of the work. Boris Kudlićka designed the scenery for this production, while the costumes were the handiwork of Arkadius, one of Poland’s most famous young fashion designers of the time.