Strikingly modernist and compulsively watchable, European film master Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1982 Blind Chance has profoundly influenced cinematic storytelling for nearly two decades. Kieslowski (The Dekalog, Three Colours) 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.
Gary Tooze
