Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/24/25

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, April 24, 2025

Blind Chance (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1987)

Boguslaw Linda in Blind Chance

Cast: Boguslaw Linda, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Boguslawa Pawelec, Marzena Trybala, Jacek Borkowski, Jacek Sas-Uhrynowski, Adam Ferency, Irena Byrska, Monika Gozdzik, Zygmunt Hübner. Screenplay: Krzysztof Kieslowski. Cinematography: Krzysztof Pakulski. Production design: Andrzej Rafal Waltenberger. Film editing: Elzbieta Kurkowska. Music: Wojciech Kilar.

A man races to catch a train that's pulling out of the station. If he catches it, his life goes in one direction. If he doesn't, it goes in another. But the binary choices of life are not as simple as that, Krzysztof Kieslowski demonstrates in Blind Chance. Witek Dlugosz (Boguslaw Linda) catches the train, and he winds up allied with the political powers-that-be. Then Kieslowski shows us what happens when Witek doesn't catch the train, and he winds up with the political opposition. But there's a third possibility: What happens if he's just a little slower in his race to catch the train, missing it by a second or two longer? In the film, he winds up choosing a non-political career in which he decides to remain neutral. But Blind Chance is not all about politics -- though that was a central obsession in life in Poland in the 1980s. It's also about sex: In each of the three versions of Witek's life, he ends up with a different woman, and that makes another important difference. Authors love to play God, and Kieslowski, a true auteur, is no exception. He's a cruel God, as the film demonstrates at both beginning and ending, and the cruelty is more shocking because of the appealing performance of Linda as the man in the hands of fate.