Two stand-alone Kieslowski films

I’m not at all surprised that Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Blind Chance” (Przypadek) was blocked in communist Poland after he shot it in 1981. I’m surprised that it was released even in 1987. It not only shows the communist party as opportunistic, but shows organized resistance to the regime.

The protagonist, a medical student, Witek Dlugosh (Boguslaw Linda), joins the party and negotiates for the state. In the first iteration he managed to run and get on a train that was en route from Lodz to Warsaw. In the second version in which he misses the train and collides with a petty official on the platform, he becomes a Christian involved in underground resistance to the communist state. In both these versions, he is denied a passport to fly to Paris.

In the third and shortest in which he gives up on catching the train and instead sees a colleague (Monika Gozdzik), he marries and has impregnated a second time, he changes his flight to Libya to the one he was blocked from taking in the other versions.

There is full-frontal female nudity (different women) in all three. I thought the movie very, very schematic a portrayal of the fateful repercussions of one happenstance (making or not making the train). The fascination with contingency became Kieslowski’s leitmotif in the (far greater!) Decalogue and the Three Colors trilogy before his death at the age of 52. It also prefigured Tom Twyker’s marvelous “Run, Lola, Run” (1998). (For a Kino DVD release, there is a rich array of special features, though Annette Insdorf’s plot summary is wrong in several particulars and it is unclear how Irena Strazakowska went from being a censor to a Kieslowski intimate.)

 

Kieslowski’s 1991 “The Double Life of Veronique” is like a parody of what Americans find insufferable about European art films: glacially paced, plotless, with opaque characters (particularly a beautiful female lead, here Irène Jacob, star of the Kieslowski film I like most, “Rouge”) having chance encounters, everything being unnaturally lit (sepia), and with a non-rock soundtrack (this one, by Zbigniew Preisner, is the best part of the movie for me, followed by the puppets). The elliptical doubling of characters and/or their experience also seems an oft-repeated aspect of European art films. I’m supposed to view it as a mystic connection? Pu-leeze!