On Screen
BROMWICH, DAVID
On Screen KESLOWSKI'S CHARITY by DAVID bromwich KRZYSZTOF KESLOWSKI'S Blue had a short run in New York, but it is the most interesting film I have seen in the last year or so, and Kieslowski is...
...Again, the episode for "Thou shalt not kill" turns out to refer to the brutal killing of a cab driver by a passenger, but also to the penalty of capital punishment...
...In all his films, death is a nearly personified power of chance and force, the singular fact that proves our lives do not belong to us...
...His stories do not concern the prosperous or the life-fulfilled...
...The heroine is another survivor, but one whose mourning leads to suicide...
...Their house has grown too big for her...
...This is a hard intuition to get onto film...
...The richness of the images, the suffusions of color that were part of a romance of place as well as person, deflected attention from this premise...
...It is initially hard to place, for example, the story of a young woman tempted by feelings of gratitude and resentment to the brink of incest with her father...
...She knows rather better than he how to compose in her husband's style...
...The invention that worked so well in the latter film, where Bergman turned the actors toward the camera and had them talk about the characters they played, is imaginable in a film by Kieslowski, but in his version the characters would talk about themselves...
...In The Unbearable Lightness of Being and in Damage, the lines of her face and even her smile spoke of a life of suffering...
...The physical beauty of his images and the intuitive rightness of his details have been remarked by all his admirers, but Kies-lowski's ear is as attentive as his eye in effects of musical scoring and sound mixing...
...Among influences, I sometimes think I can see traces of Bergman at the abstract extreme of The Silence, or the naturalistic extreme of The Passion of Anna...
...One episode goes to each of the ten commandments, but the plots are often at an angle to the transgression named...
...On that strange and familiar gesture—a consolation she can give rather than take—the first part of Kieslowski's trilogy ends...
...His emphasis on individual scenes and the expository depth of many of them—itself a reaction against the glibness of montage—makes for a family resemblance that his films share mainly with each other...
...Kafka could imply on any page of his books a retrospective self-defeat in acts that carried no apparent token of determinism...
...On the other hand, erotic pursuit and mastery are far from a concern that Kieslowski's people can cherish...
...The moral ground-note of his work can be heard very steadily in The Decalogue (now available from Fox Video...
...We are even smaller, he says, than our more realistic hopes, but that is how things are...
...It is a characteristic thought for Kieslowski—impartial in its sympathy for those who accept the pardon and those who ultimately refuse to ask it...
...A woman in her 30s survives the car wreck in which her husband and child perished...
...Blue is about the second and third sips...
...She goes back to him, for the time being, and makes love to him...
...It will be a little heavy and awkward...
...After they make love she speaks, in Polish, a soliloquy that comes as close as the film ever does to explaining her feelings about her life...
...Sex can have a motive close to despair, but its exertions come from an irreducible demand that is one of the few things in life beyond suspicion...
...The brutal practicality grates against the tenderness, and the emotions are left at a standoff...
...The friend, a man of more modest gifts, says of his own additions to the score: "This music can be mine...
...his notes for an unfinished work have to be sorted out...
...On Screen KESLOWSKI'S CHARITY by DAVID bromwich KRZYSZTOF KESLOWSKI'S Blue had a short run in New York, but it is the most interesting film I have seen in the last year or so, and Kieslowski is one of the most rewarding directors alive...
...Her husband was a famous composer...
...His bowing to pressure is not shown as a defection from love or idealism...
...I make films," he has said, "about how hard it is to live...
...The young man reads the glance as a solicitation: "Fifty dollars...
...she must settle in an apartment somewhere in Paris...
...I like to...
...The protester makes his compromise, and gains his freedom...
...there are suggestions that she wrote much of his music all along, so that his death was for her the loss of a mask...
...There is, in truth, a mystical element in his fascination with death—personified in The Double Life in the figure of the marionette artist who keeps contact with a dead Polish woman and her look-alike in Paris...
...Since putting a stop to any life is a thought she cannot bear, she borrows a neighbor's cat...
...Kieslowski has to rely more literally on echoes of face or gesture, visual coincidences that have a shadowy explanation, and now and then quotations from writers...
...Blue closes with the heroine assisting a friend who is trying to finish her husband's uncompleted work...
...It is important that the man not understand her words, and just as important that the words be said...
...In her apartment she hears a squeaky noise, and finds in the broom closet a litter of mice...
...A neighbor of the heroine in Blue is a live-sex performer in a disco joint, dismayed when she sees her father once in the audience...
...It made some people instantly regard him as a piece of French sophistication whose beliefs were possibly mystical and certainly pretentious...
...The sense is strong in all his work of people caught in the toils of habit, or brought low by an unspectacular dip of fortune...
...The heroine, in a coffee shop, glances at an American sitting at a nearby table, whose hands remind her of her dead husband's...
...The better one comes to know this director, the longer one's patience grows...
...She connects the protester with an established lawyer who advises the man to soften his dissidence and agree to cooperate with a politically sanctioned labor union...
...Because she desires not to be known, she nods and takes him to a hotel...
...more life, more equivocation...
...He was a lawyer, in the midst of his advocacy of a Solidarity protester, and the wife picks up the loose ends...
...The heroine's suicide is not shown as an evasion of the political struggle...
...Political circumstances in Poland may have left their mark on Kieslowski's style in the form of a reticence one is apt to read as wholly personal...
...The Decalogue is infused with a pity both common and uninsistent—a view taken by one human creature, who happens to be an artist, of the vicissitudes of others...
...When you come to think about it, this quality is miraculous and as rare as any persistent virtue...
...Though his pity is Christian in its bearings, Kieslowski has no more regard for religion than for any other practice of ritual or compulsion...
...Still, The Double Life has a wonderful consistency in its treatment of outward exile and inward affinity, themes close to Kieslow-ski everywhere...
...The incident is worked for neither pity nor humor...
...The Double Life of Veronique, in America the most widely seen of Kieslowski's films, gave a misleading clue to his temperament...
...I took The Double Life to be partly an allegory of a man who left one country to make films in another, an exiled artist's uneasy act of assent to life in translation...
...Sex in these films is not the subordinate fact most serious films make it out to be...
...Blue is a richer film that actually earns the weight of her look...
...The prudent old lawyer in No End, having obtained the release of his dissident client, reads aloud some lines of poetry to comfort a success that is also an end of defiance...
...Something like this does happen in No End...
...In movies, where visual tricks like a single actress playing two parts are legitimately expected to give an account of themselves, the enigmatic relation between the living and dead sharers of the same life seemed a cheat, as it would not seem if you encountered it in a long story by Kleist or Hoffmann...
...No End, a film Kieslowski made in 1984 lately released on video by New Yorker Films, is a parallel story that sheds a good deal of light on Blue...
...Why, asks the heroine, do you do it...
...She sees the funeral on videotape during a brief stay in a hospital, and memories of the dead tug at her like an unspoken request...
...These lines tell about a wolf who has become a mangy dog, with a glint no longer of cunning but of age in his yellow eye...
...The metaphysical hypothesis in which he sets some store is the idea of magical links between person and person, or between a single person and a fate...
...That difficulty belongs to a world of conscious effort and not of drives or hungers...
...I look forward to parts two and three...
...She visits her mother, who is mentally dead, and the TV in the convalescent home shows inexplicable soundless images of bungee-jump-ing: a metaphor eerily resonant with her own suspense between death and life...
...Visiting the woman, she finds her pregnant with his child...
...This sequence of 10 stories, filmed in the late 1980s, deals with the inhabitants of an apartment complex in Warsaw...
...None of this is the same as finding a new life or caring to find one...
...An interior scene of a couple drinking coffee and quietly conversing will be penetrated by dim noises from elsewhere: the sounds of traffic, or feet on stairs, or a door slamming in the night...
...Juliette Binoche plays the heroine, and it is a role she has long been working toward...
...Kieslowski, who was born in 1941, belongs to the first Polish generation to grow up with habits formed in the postwar years...
...Binoche is in almost every frame, and we see her watching things—with revulsion, then resistance, then with a clarity that is grave without being heavy...
...Ambition, the trait whose assertion or absence shapes all the characters in movies from the commercial democracies, is, for the men and women Kieslowski portrays, simply not one of the relevant properties of life...
...Her husband, Antek Zyro—a name with the half allegorical shading Kieslowski sometimes favors?has died in his 30s of a heart attack...
...So too, the hero of Remembrance of Things Past, after his grandmother's death, took a sip of water and realized that this accidental reflex of continuing life broke the perfectness of his grief...
...Then she makes another discovery, that her husband had a mistress...
...They appear to strive in human dealings for the effect he aims at estheti-cally, an ordinary accuracy of vision...
...Writing does it by verbal echoes, repetitions, calculated shifts of mood and tense or hints that belong to rhetoric more than to grammar...
...The wolf asks pardon from those who may have expected a more savage bravery...
...the temptation eludes definition and seems so accidental as to defy naming...
...I think everybody does...
...The first of a trilogy in French—whose other parts, White and Red, will be released by Miramax—Blue is a story of oblique energy and intelligence about the work of mourning...
Vol. 77 • April 1994 • No. 4
