Features: DVD, English, Subtitled
Strikingly modernist and compulsively watchable, European film master Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1981 Blind Chance has profoundly influenced cinematic storytelling for nearly two decades. Kieslowski (Dekalog, The Double Life of Veronique) blends his trademark passion for character and poetic imagery with a boldly novelistic narrative conceit. Blind Chance transcendently illuminates the intersection of fate, coincidence and choice.Facing an unclear future, Witek, an earnest young Polish medical student, chooses to put his education on hold. With his head full of the promising and ominous portents of his new adult life, Witek hurries to catch the last train to Warsaw. But as he races down the platform, Blind Chance blossoms into three successive scenarios in which Witek's catching or missing his train spawns three completely different futures. Whether as an idealistic Communist Party member, an ambivalent dissident or a devoted healer and husband, the young Pole's destiny is shaped by the unhappy youth threatening to hobble him, the troubled present poised to engulf him and, in Kieslowski's words, "the powers that meddle with our fate." Through three complex lives, actor Boguslaw Linda portrays Witek with an effortless magnetism remarkable even for a Kieslowski film. Actor and director's commitment and vision succeed in creating three entirely different portraits each as compellingly real as the next. Made on the eve of Communist crackdown in Poland, Blind Chance was suppressed for nearly seven years.
"One of Kieslowski's best films...Should not be missed." Hollywood Reporter
Editor's Note
Acclaimed director Krzysztof Kieslowski presents this sociopolitical drama about life in modern Poland. The story follows Witek (Boguslaw Linda), whose life is played out in three different variations after an insignificant train encounter. In the first version, Witek catches the train, meets a sincere communist, and becomes a party activist. In the second, he bumps into a guard while trying to catch the train. He is arrested, stands trial, and is sent to an unpaid labor park where he encounters an individual from the opposition and becomes a militant member of their group. In the final strand, he misses the train, meets a fellow student, falls in love, and settles into a calm life as a doctor who wants nothing to do with politics. Kieslowski uses his seemingly fantastic plot device to make his point even more dramatically, showing how thin the line is between each of these characters and their lives. At the same time, he condemns politics by humanizing them and keeping them closely related. A powerful reflection of a country in transition, Kieslowski's BLIND CHANCE is a moving work that enlightens while it entertains.
Plot Summary
Three possible lives of the same man are portrayed in this study of fate set in late- 20th-century Poland from renowned director Krzysztof Kieslowski. The film is a meditation on the nature of chance and the thin yet intricate web of psychological and physical connections that play a role.
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