Review of Blind Chance (1987) by Rabeea'h A — 09 Jul 2008

All my films, from the first to the most recent ones, are about individuals who can't quite find their bearings, who don't quite know how to live, who don't really know what's right or wrong and are desperately looking.

- Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Blind Chance mostly seems to be a penetrating political discourse in the guise of a metaphysical inquiry of the state of humanity in a state-controlled world. Unfortunately, since my knowledge of Polish history was next to nothing, it required rapid internalization of a few articles to familiarize myself with the context of the situations alluded to, say the violent strike after which the protagonist of the film is born, the Polish 1968 political crisis that forces his friend's family out of Poland etc. On an interesting note, I found that the Communist Werner was actually a former member of the Party's Central Committee - Kieslowski and synchronicity.

Maybe I shouldn't have said 'guise' of metaphysical inquiry, the film is also' a provocative portrait on the malleability of fate in relation to chance and coincidence (however one wishes to define it) in a way that hope almost seems redundant. It attempts to trace the complex and undefined and the ultimate inevitable trajectory of life. Witeks desperation to find something to believe in reverberated a little too starkly.

I didn't say anchor. See!