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. 

The Scar (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1976)

Franciszek Pieczka in The Scar

Stefan Bednarz: Franciszek Pieczka
The Chairman: Mariusz Dmochowski
Bednarz's Assistant: Jerzy Stuhr
TV Editor: Michal Tarkowski
Minister: Stanislaw Igar
Eva: Joanna Orzeszkowska
Bednarz's Wife: Halina Winiarska
Bednarz's Secretary: Agnieszka Holland

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Screenplay: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Romuald Karas
Based on a novel by Romuald Karas
Cinematography: Slawomir Idziak

The Scar was Krzysztof Kieslowski's first non-documentary theatrical feature -- he had previously made a fiction film for television -- and it's a quite accomplished one. He draws heavily on his work as a documentary maker to tell the story of the frustrating experiences of Stefan Bednarz, a member of the Polish Communist Party, who is picked to build and run a factory making chemical fertilizer in Olechów, a town where he and his wife had previously lived. His wife, however, has no interest in returning to Olechów -- she has unpleasant memories of the place and its people, some of whom Bednarz will be forced to work with -- so she stays behind in Warsaw, as does their grown daughter, Eva, whose liberated lifestyle vexes Bednarz. From the outset, Bednarz is faced with conflict from the residents of the town, who resent having the forest felled and some of the older houses torn down to make way for the construction. Throughout his stay in Olechów, Bednarz will struggle with townspeople, old resentments, management bureaucracy, government bureaucracy, discontented workers, and the media. Seen today, The Scar resonates with both Polish history and worldwide environmental concerns -- there's a heartbreaking scene of a deer, displaced from the forest, begging food from humans, who feed it cigarettes -- but even then it was a striking demonstration of Kieslowski's ability to work with actors, including many non-professionals, and to craft a narrative.

Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Camera Buff (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1979)

Malgorzata Zabkowska and Jerzy Stuhr in Camera Buff

Filip Mosz: Jerzy Stuhr
Irka Mosz: Malgorzata Zabkowska
Anna Wlodarczyk: Ewa Pokas
The Director: Stefan Czyzewski
Osuch: Jerzy Nowak
Witek: Tadeusz Bradecki
Piotr: Marek Litewka
Warwzyniec: Tadeusz Rzepka

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Screenplay: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Jerzy Stuhr
Cinematography: Jacek Petrycki
Music: Krzysztof Knittel

Film, said Jean-Luc Godard, is "truth 24 times a second." But as Oscar Wilde put it, "The truth is rarely pure and never simple," which is the problem amateur filmmaker Filip Mosz runs into when he begins to devote his life to making movies. Filip, a purchasing agent for a state-run factory in the Polish town of Wielice, buys a Russian-made 8mm camera when his first child is born. His wife, Irka, is not entirely thrilled by the purchase, which cost him two months' salary, and she grows even more disenchanted when he devotes more and more time to his new hobby. Filming his new daughter takes up less and less of his time after the director of the factory says he will buy film for Filip if he will make a documentary about an anniversary celebration of the factory's founding, at which numerous Communist Party higher-ups will be present. Filip throws himself whole-heartedly into the project, going to movies more often and reading film books to pick up tips about filmmaking technique. When the director sees the film he makes some suggestions for cuts: Don't show the bigwigs slipping out of the meeting to go to the bathroom, for example, and what's with all the insert shots of pigeons? And then Anna, a pretty representative of the state film commission, shows up to suggest that Filip enter his movie in a festival celebrating industrial filmmaking. This only adds fuel to Irka's jealousy of Filip's avocation. Filip takes third prize at the festival -- after a judge proclaims that none of the films entered deserved a first prize -- and attracts the notice of a TV station in Krakow, which is interested in news footage from Wielice. As Filip's filmmaking career snowballs, however, so do his troubles: The neglected Irka leaves him, and the director informs him that the footage he has sent to the TV station, revealing that renovation funds for the town have been misused, has caused some projects, like a nursery school, to be canceled, and that he has had to fire some of Filip's fellow workers. Camera Buff is clearly a fable, about the compulsiveness that drives and sometimes destroys artists, as well as a rather oblique satire on the dreariness of Polish life under communist rule. At the end of the film, Filip is reduced to filming perhaps the only thing he can be sure of: himself.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

The Double Life of Véronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)

The Netflix series Sense8 is about eight people born at the same moment in widely dispersed parts of the world. Each possesses the psychic gift to communicate with the others, sometimes to rescue one of the eight from danger. (They also occasionally participate in rather impressive group sex. Perhaps as a team-building exercise.) Sense8 takes the ancient idea that everyone has a Doppelgänger -- a physical and sometimes psychic twin -- and cubes it, eliminating the physical identity while boosting the psychic one. Krzystof Kieslowski sticks to the more traditional idea of the Doppelgänger in The Double Life of Véronique, in which Irène Jacob plays both a Polish woman named Weronika and a French woman named Véronique. Neither is fully aware of the other's existence, although Weronika once tells her father that she doesn't feel alone in the world, and Véronique tells hers that she has a feeling she has lost someone, as indeed she has: Weronika has died. Their paths crossed only once, when Véronique visited Kraków as a tourist, but although Weronika saw her double on a tour bus, Véronique learns of her existence only later, when she examines a photograph she took that includes Weronika. Kieslowski's film, from a screenplay he wrote with Krzysztof Piesewicz, deals with the parallel lives of the two women and with their emotional and symbolic intersections. It's all remarkably done, with a superb performance by Jacob that equals and sometimes surpasses her work in Kieslowski's Three Colors: Red (1994), and extraordinarily expressive cinematography by Slawomir Idziak that manipulates colors with haunting effect. As with Red, however, I feel a bit let down by Kieslowski's tendency to go for sentiment: I'm left with a feeling that there's something hollow at the film's core, a lack of substance underlying the impressive acting and technique. Still, a lesser director than Kieslowski might have gone all the way, to a Hollywood-style romantic ending instead of the somewhat ambiguous one he gives us.  

Three Colors (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993, 1994)

I skipped a couple of days' postings because I wanted to watch all three films in Kieslowski's trilogy before writing about them. The trilogy was once a big deal, earning Kieslowski multiple awards, but I think its reputation has faded a bit. It's remarkably clever in its play on the three colors of the French flag, and its visual use of each one in the corresponding film, and in the way bits of action are used to link the three films, but I think the cleverness sometimes results in heavy-handedness.

Blue (1993)
The extraordinary cinematography of Slawomir Idziak and the performance by Juliette Binoche carry this first film in the trilogy, which takes liberté, the color signified by blue in the French tricolor, as its theme. Binoche plays Julie, who survives a car crash that kills her husband and daughter. Finding that she is unable to swallow the pills she obtains to commit suicide, she determines to live a completely detached life, doing nothing. Her husband, Patrice, was a famous composer, and Julie, also a composer, refuses to aid Olivier (Benoît Régent), her husband's sometime collaborator, in completing the concerto Patrice had been composing in celebration of the formation of the European Union. After sleeping with Olivier, Julie puts the estate she and her husband owned up for sale and tries to go into hiding, renting a small flat in Paris. But however much she tries to disengage herself from the world around her, Julie keeps being drawn back in. She refuses to sign a neighbor's petition to evict Lucille, a dancer in a strip club, thereby earning Lucille's gratitude. She is sought out by a boy who witnessed the fatal accident and wants to return a gold cross he found at the site and to tell her Patrice's last words -- the punch line to a joke he was telling when he lost control of the car. And she discovers that her husband had a mistress, who is carrying the child he didn't know he had conceived with her. All of this leads Julie to the realization that the liberty she had sought is illusory, that it can't be found in detachment but, to put it in terms of the tricolor, in conjunction with equality and fraternity -- treating Lucille as a equal, for example, and collaborating with Olivier to complete Patrice's concerto, which takes as text for its choral section the verses about love in 1 Corinthians. Visually beautiful with striking use of the titular color throughout, Blue has a romantic glossiness that takes away from the grit and urgency that it might have benefited from.

White (1994)
The middle film of the trilogy is a dark comedy about an exiled Polish hairdresser, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), whose French wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy), divorces him because of his impotence. Still desperately in love with Dominique, Karol finds himself homeless, playing tunes on a comb and tissue paper to earn small change in the Métro. Another Pole hears Karol playing a Polish song and strikes up an acquaintance, eventually helping Karol smuggle himself back to Poland in a large suitcase, which is stolen before Karol can emerge from it. After being dumped in a landfill, Karol makes his way home to his brother's beauty parlor, and begins a long process of rehabilitation, in which he makes a fortune, and devises an elaborate plot that involves faking his own death, with which he eventually gets even with Dominique, though the revenge is bittersweet. The screenplay, written by Kieslowski with his usual collaborator, Krzysztof Piesewicz, is ingeniously put together, though the theme of égalité is not quite so central to White as the corresponding color themes are to Blue and Red.  Zamachowski is impressive in his journey from victim to victor, but Delpy's role feels somewhat undeveloped. What could have attracted her to this schlub in the first place? As usual, there are some ingenious links between White and the other two films: Juliette Binoche's Julie can be glimpsed entering the courtroom where Karol and Dominique's divorce hearing is taking place, just as in Blue, we caught a glimpse of Delpy and Zamachowski from Julie's point of view in the same setting.

Red (1994)
Not only the last film in the trilogy, Red was also Kieslowski's final film before his death. He had announced his retirement after the release of the film, and died of complications from open-heart surgery in 1996. The film drew three Oscar nominations, for director, screenplay (Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesewicz), and cinematography (Piotr Sobocinski). It deserved one for Jean-Louis Trintignant's performance as Joseph Kern, a retired judge who spends his time electronically eavesdropping on his neighbors' phone calls. Irène Jacob plays Valentine, a model who encounters Kern when she accidentally hits his dog with her car. The two strike up an unusual friendship as the beautiful young woman draws the misanthropic judge out of his self-imposed exile, ironically by awakening his conscience and causing him to turn himself in to the authorities who convict him of invasion of privacy. In the tricolor scheme, red stands fraternité, and the film delivers on the theme with Kern's emerging empathy. Again, the film links with its predecessors, both of which included scenes in which an elderly person, bent with age, struggles to force a plastic bottle into an aperture in a recycling bin. In Blue, Julie ignored and perhaps didn't even see the person's difficulty; Karol in Red notices but does nothing to help. Only Valentine sees and goes to the person's aid. But I find the ending of Red a little forced, in which the survivors of a disaster at see include not only Valentine, but also Julie and Olivier from Blue, and Karol and Dominique, who have somehow reunited despite the ending of White.

No End (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1985)

I probably should have brushed up on the political situation -- the suppression of Solidarity, the imposition of martial law -- in Poland in 1982, the time depicted in Kieslowski's film. It would have made the narrative a little easier to follow, and would have more readily explained the melancholy, despairing tone that pervades the entire film. On the other hand, Kieslowski and his co-screenwriter, Krzysztov Piesiewicz, make things emotionally lucid for at least this uninformed viewer. After all, I don't expect a film to rest entirely on a knowledge of outside context to succeed: All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) is still an acclaimed movie, even though most people who watch it today didn't sit glued to their TV sets, as I did, during the impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon. What makes Kieslowski's film work is placing its politics in the context of personal loss, the death of the lawyer Antek Zyro (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) and its effect on his wife, Urszula (Grazyna Szapolowska), and child (Krzysztof Krzeminski). Having the dead Antek address the camera at the film's beginning is a bold move, one that threatens to turn the film into a sentimental fable about a love that persists after death. But as we see, the relationship of husband and wife was not an ideal one, and the feeling of guilt that she experiences after his death is potently developed. (I'm not sure it entirely justifies the film's ending, however.) The point here is that a premature death like Antek's inevitably results in unfinished business, not only in the life of his family but also in the legal case, that of the incarcerated political prisoner Darek Stach (Artur Barcis) he left undefended. The defense of Stach devolves upon Mieczyslaw Labrador (Aleksander Bardini), the aging lawyer who would not have been Antek's choice for the role. Labrador saves Stach from a longer prison term by engineering a compromise with the judge, a move opposed by Labrador's own assistant (Michal Bajor), who still clings to some of the ideals of the suppressed Solidarity movement. The decision makes no one really happy, because Stach, like everyone else in Poland, isn't really free. The interweaving of the Stach case and Urszula's attempts to resume a normal life despite grief and guilt is sensitively handled, with the great help of Krystyna Rutkowska's editing and Zbigniew Preisner's score.