Blind Chance

Dir: Krzysztof Kieslowski
1981 rel. 1987
Blind Chance is one of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s mid-period films before he dove into The Dekalog, but which sat on the shelf for six years because of its political content. The film shows us Witek, a student reeling from his father’s death a week before and in a rush to catch a train to Warsaw. The three narratives of Blind Chance show us what happens when he 1) made the train, 2) missed the train, and 3) missed the train and ran into a guard. Witek (Boguslaw Linda) remains the same personality throughout, but the fortunes and characters around him change, so that in one outcome he becomes a Communist Party Member, in another a militant opposition member, and another an apolitical doctor.
The prologue to this is a beautiful montage of memories that make up Witek’s past, in which Kieslowski’s camera floats seemingly in and out of the head of the child, subjective then objective. I am reminded of the pure poetry and economy found late in Trois Colours: Blue’s car crash sequence. Yet at the same time, this 20 or so scenes will later act as clues to why Witek makes the choices he does, his deference to his father, his attitude toward women, his need to belong to groups but his failure to insinuate himself within them.
In all three Witek becomes involved with a protest by students at a hospital; he winds up with conflicting allegiances; he meets women from his past; and he is presented with a ticket to France. Characters from one narrative turn up in the following story as background “extras,” and questions from one story are answered in another. When Witek meets his first love in the first story, she has a hand smudged with black. It’s only in the second story where we figure out that she must have been helping print underground books, as Witek joins the student press that she worked for tangentially.
Character, then, is less likely to shape our destinies than our interactions with others and the choices we make within those situations. In one story, Witek finds religion (he gazes at a horrifically kitsch photo of Jesus, one that open and closes its eyes depending on where you stand, and then goes asks to be baptized) but we never get a sense that God is shaping his fate (of course, we understand that Kieslowski the writer is).
This is an energizing film for those who have watched too many straight narratives recently (that is, me), and which ends with a final shot like a kick in the lungs.
However, the opening shot, which features Witek on the train, yelling at the camera (which dives into his mouth), has led some to believe that all three stories are Witek’s fantasies on fate, but I don’t see this. However, the shot doesn’t fit into the rest of the film–it’s more of a frontespiece, a scream of existential terror to welcome us to the tale.