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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. Kino is proud to present this underseen masterpiece for the
first time in the US on DVD and video. |
