244 - Blind Chance, 1981/1987, Poland. Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Friday, September 1, 2017

244 - Blind Chance, 1981/1987, Poland.  Dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Blind Chance is the prototype for films like Run Lola Run (1998) and Sliding Doors (1998).

It is the story--or shall we say three stories--of a medical student and what happens to him depending on whether he makes or misses his train, and whether or not he bumps into the station guard on the platform.

Sliding Doors, released seventeen years after Blind Chance was made, offers two stories that depend on whether Gwyneth Paltrow's character makes or misses her train.

Run Lola Run, which follows three parallel stories, also begins with a subway train, but Lola's three runs do not depend on whether she makes or misses the train (it is her boyfriend who misses it), but rather her three runs are shown successively with different timing in each one.

Run Lola Run was directed by Tom Tykwer, who likewise directed Kieslowski's script Heaven (2002), the first of an intended trilogy, to be followed by Hell and Purgatory.  Kieslowski died before making the trilogy.

Witek screams.

We will discover in the final shot of the movie what this opening scream shot means.  Until then, we do not know.

In a hospital a bloody body is dragged across the floor.

A boy in a mirror does his homework under his father's tutelage.

A boy says goodbye to his friend.

A boy looks through a window.

A young man kisses his girlfriend, is heckled by riders on a passing train, and chases the train.

Chases the train.  He will do that again.

A medical student observes and participates in a surgery.  An autopsy.

What do these scenes mean?  What is going on in this story?

We will discover later that they are moments in the life of one man.  Witek Dlugosz.

He is training to be a doctor.  He is on leave.  He runs to catch his train.  He bumps into a woman and makes her drop her coin.  The coin rolls (like the wedding ring rolling in Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde (1965) from a few days ago (238, 8/27/2017)).  He sees a man with a beer pick up the coin. He sees the training departing.  He chases the train.

In the first story he catches the train.  He meets a Communist party man.  He joins the party.  He runs into Czuszka and hooks up with her.

In the second story he misses the train.  He bumps into the station guard and spars with him.  He is sentenced to community service.  He becomes anti-Communist.  He becomes Roman Catholic.  He runs into Werka and hooks up with her.

In the third story he misses the train.  He does not bump into the station guard.  He finishes his work as a medical student and becomes a doctor.  He does not become political or religious at all.  He runs into Olga and hooks up with her, and marries her, and has a boy, and is about to have a girl.  And then we find out why he was screaming in the opening shot of the film.

Could this be what actually does happen to him?  (Because it is shown in the opening shot.)  Or are all three outcomes always equally possible?

The three stories also show differences in his interactions with the women who drops the coin and the man with the beer, as well as other people whom he does or does not encounter.

The stories also have convergences.  Some things happen to Witek regardless of which path he treads.

Some critics criticize the film for being too mathematically structured.  For me this is like criticizing Baroque music for being to precisely composed.  It is the style of the film.  It is the aesthetic choice of the director.  Kieslowski made a choice.  Let us follow him in it and see where it leads us.

But they go further.

They complain that a man's religious, political, romantic, and life choices must not depend on such minute divergences.  They assert that they would have made and kept their convictions regardless of whether or not they made the train or bumped into the station guard.  Consequently, they define Witek's character as being unformed and malleable, and they pass judgment on him for being so easily swayed.

But in doing so they deny what Kieslowski is doing.  Rather than embracing the artifice, they analyze it from a distance with that common critical reaction--"But that would not happen in real life!"

First, so what?  This is a work of fiction.

Second, how do they know?  Have they lived the same life twice?

Their defensiveness adds to the joy of watching this film.  Kieslowski has pushed a button.

Kieslowski has asked a question:  What if the chance occurrence of a single moment in time could affect the entire outcome of an individual life?

Like butterfly wings.  Like pond ripples.

The Butterfly Effect.

Edward Norton Lorenz published his famous lecture in 1972: "Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"

Lorenz immediately qualified the title in his opening remarks.  Not to suggest that one flap of one butterfly creates one tornado, but "Is the behavior of the atmosphere unstable with respect to perturbations of small amplitude?"

The concepts that would be popularized by James Gleick's 1987 book Chaos had been building for nearly a hundred years.  The ideas were in the air when Kieslowski made his movie.  He may have been aware of them.

Could a small divergence in a single moment of one person's life have a great impact on the direction that person's life takes?

We do know this:  If one places two objects beside each other facing the same direction and then rotates one of the objects to the right or left a single degree, then the farther the objects move forward, the farther apart they will be from one another as they go.

Kieslowski's concept of Blind Chance is a play on the oxymoron "blind faith."  What if chance plays a role in people's lives?  What if chance is blind, disinterested, impersonal, like the laws of physics?

What if?

The interplay between free will and predestination, or fate, is the question Kieslowski has put on the table.  It is worth exploring.

In his hands, it is also entertaining.

Kieslowski's films are imaginatively delicious.

They are good rides.