No End

This is an excellent film and a great discovery. It's from about ten years before The Double Life Of Veronica and the Three Colours trilogy and is, it its way, equally good. It almost certainly inspired Truly, Madly, Deeply because the main story is about a young lawyer, Antek Zyro (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) who tells us at the outset that he is dead and spends the remainder of the film watching over his widow and young son. Grazyna Szpapolowska is outstanding, not to say beautiful, as the widow who 'feels' her husband everywhere and tries a variety of remedies - hypnosis, casual sex - to dispel his presence all to no avail. It's a stunning film shot in muted blue tones throughout and well worth a visit. 9/10

Grazyna Szapolowska's husband dies. He was a public defender, so she tries to arrange for his last client, Artur Barcis, to have a good defendant. She arranges for Aleksander Bardini, under whom her husband had apprenticed, to take the case. Barcis is accused of having led an illegal strike, and Bardini works to have him tread the middle ground of confessing and denial.

Krzysztof Kieslowski's movie is a murky one that tells us we can never tell what is going on at the moment. Only in retrospect can we figure out what was going on, and even that may not be true. It is a gloomy movie, with a lot of motivation left unclear. Did Miss Szapolowska really love her husband? Why has Bardini, who hasn't taken a case of this sort for more than 30 years, taken this one? What was the strike actually about? That remains uncertain, even after the movie's end.

The narrative in this film is far too flawed. There are two intertwining halves of it, one good, one poor. The good one involves a woman, Ulla, whose husband died suddenly and unexpectedly one morning while he waited in his car to take their son to school. Now he gently haunts his family as they deal with the pain. The acting is magnificent here. Kieslowski is masterful at directing his actors in material like this, as he would show a million different times in The Decalogue, made a few years later. There are a few outrageously and subtly powerful scenes. Most memorable is the one where Ulla decides to prostitute herself to a British tourist. This happens about a month after her husband has died. After the man has sex with her, she asks him if he speaks Polish. He says no, and then she begins to talk about her problems in Polish. The other half of the plot is utterly weak in comparison. The husband was a lawyer, and the defendant in the case he was working on is screwed because of the death. The defendant's wife comes to Ulla for help, and though she is refused help at first, Ulla eventually introduces her to her husband's mentor, a cynical old man about to be kicked out of the business. Perhaps it's just my aversion to lawyer and courtroom dramas, but I just didn't care a lick what happened in this part of the plot. Supposedly it's meant as a criticism against the Communist law at the time. I don't know. It's dull whatever it is. But the film is slightly worth watching, especially for the acting. Even in the parts that I didn't care for, the acting is exquisite. 7/10.

Written by Kieslowski and Piesiewicz, NO END stars the beautiful and beguiling Grazyna Szapolowska as the widow of a lawyer who suddenly died of a heart attack. Her late husband, Antek (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) was in the middle of defending a man arrested for his part in a strike at a factory. His widow, Ursula, suggests that the arrested man be represented by Antek's teacher, an old lawyer named Labrador (Aleksander Bardini), and becomes peripherally involved in the case as she works through her grief. Antek's ghost makes his presence felt in surprising ways.

No End has been compared to the later French movie BLEU, starring Juliette Binoche, but it's a much more sober offering, more enigmatic. One has a feeling of lives interrupted, like being stuck in an elevator, fearful that the cable could break or the doors open upon something horrible. Not that the film is scary or suspenseful, but simply that the characters, people generally, are at the mercy of forces they cannot understand, beyond their control.

Fans of the Colours Trilogy and of the Double Life of Veronique will probably enjoy this. It has all Kieslowski's magic, his special way with light and shadow.

I've began to follow Kieslowski over the past days, hoping to finally encounter his color films which I've seen for years pop up among the brilliant works. I watched this as background glimpse into his formative period. Interestingly he does two things:

One is he presents a world that has come undone and carries the past. A woman, her husband has died as the film begins, life has broken down and she has to go out and face it. Everything that she encounters is an echo from the past. Two instances that involve photos exemplify it; nude photos of her that her husband had found but he's now gone before she had a chance to explain, the other shows an idyllic summer that he possibly spent with another woman (before they met?). But also an old friend who now vies for her, a night of prostituting herself because he reminds her of her husband, being hypnotized to forget him conjures his presence, and round it goes from bewilderment to epiphany.

The other thing they do here is look to frame a response to bewilderment felt by Poles who had just been through strikes and martial law. A man is awaiting trial, different narratives are offered up by lawyers. Should he be pragmatic or protest? It's one of the threads that were left undone at the time of the husband's death who was a lawyer on the case. His own advice, which I perceive to be Kieslowski's, is for everyone to remove the distortions that prevent them from seeing each other.

Viewers who are content to encounter a life of episodic confusion will be happy with what he does. I miss a more penetratingly visual way of threading these events and, already from my brief glimpses into Dekalog, I believe it's this ability to surround and submerge causality that he's going to cultivate, a way of dreaming in advance. Here, tellingly, we have the husband announcing his own death in the very first shot whereas it could have been threaded as discovery and glimpsed in a haze (he already tries this by the first episode of Dekalog).