Restored by DI Factory and presented in Venezia Classici, Przypadek (Blind Chance, 1981) by Krzysztof Kieślowski explores, through three variations of a single life, the tension between chance and choice, fate and responsibility, against the backdrop of Communist Poland.
Well before a mainstream feel-good film like Sliding Doors, with Przypadek Krzysztof Kieślowski had already demonstrated, almost mathematically, how a minimal fact (managing or failing to catch a departing train) can completely change a life. Witek (Bogusław Linda) lives three different lives depending on that tiny event: in one he joins the Communist Party, in another he enters the Catholic resistance, in the third he tries to remain “neither with one side nor the other.” Central figures in one life may reappear in another as casual encounters or anonymous faces in the crowd. Yet in all versions three forms of defeat await him (already inscribed in the title, which appears over the detail of his screaming mouth). The film notably works with false subjective shots, soon revealed as objective or slightly unreal.
Witek Długosz, a medical student, experiences three alternative fates triggered by a random detail: catching or missing a train at Łódź Fabryczna station. In the first, he becomes a Party official, soon disillusioned by its contradictions; in the second, sentenced to commu...
Another stylistic trait, connected to subjectivity, is the abundance of direct looks into the camera. In this remarkable film Kieślowski leads us into the heart of his cinema: the dialectic between chance and choice, fate and responsibility. Characteristically, he frames the three possibilities not only on the level of personal events but against a broad moral and political background: the agony of communist dictatorship in Poland. In its stark, powerful intensity, which directly questions us about life, Przypadek (1981) opens the highest season of Kieślowski’s cinema, that of The Decalogue.
