przypadek

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First collected by asgerd
May 13, 2009
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Przypadek, dir. Kieślowski, Poland 1981; 122min. Kieślowski was simply miraculous and this was one of his earlier films, made in 1981 though not released until 1987, as Poland started to emerge from wherever it had been. The international title is Blind Chance though I think (with my imperfect Polish) that the meaning is more than that: accident, incident?  And there is one, finally.  Witek the medical student is running for a train and catches it, misses it or misses it in a different way, and has three lives: apparatchik, dissident or happily married doctor. This concept of multiple possibilities is Kieślowski's thing, underlying also The Double Life of Veronica, and Three Colours - and apparently it inspired the much inferior Sliding Doors. The editing in Przypadek is a bit jumpy and each of the three segments is too short, but it's very Polish, and I like the fine detail: partly for the physical details of the Poland I knew 10 years later (the long windows, the tea glasses, the square buses, blackened courtyards and broken pavements) and partly for the humanity of such close attention to the personal. For all that it juxtaposes late-Stalinism with new Solidarność with religion with family and professional life, it's about one recognisably consistent ordinary guy living through his time. It reminds me of Ashes and Diamonds, Jerzy Andrzejewski's novel (and Wajda's film) about the last days of the war as the various factions (then the communists, the AK partisans and the collaborators) come into sharp focus and people find themselves in the middle of it all.  Ashes and Przypadek sort of bookend that era in Poland - both very useful in explaining it.
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