BLIND CHANCE (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1981)

Filmmaker and Kieślowski friend Agnieszka Holland has suggested that writer-director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Przypadek involves “the mechanics of human destiny.” The film was made in the shadow of his mother’s death earlier that year in a car crash.
     Wietold Diugosz, nicknamed Witek (Boguslaw Linda, intelligent though bland—nonetheless, best actor, Polish Film Festival), is a young medical student whose father’s ambiguous rambling, right before dying, Witek interprets as perhaps freeing him from the commitment to become a doctor that his father had imposed on him. The Earth seemingly all before him, Witek catches a train to Warsaw, where he becomes a Communist Party member, causing the police arrest of his girlfriend, an underground activist, and his own disillusionment.
     Now two alternative scenarios play out, in both of which Witek misses catching the train. In the first of these, he accosts a policeman at the station and is arrested, upon release from labor camp becomes attached to the anti-Communist underground movement and embraces Catholicism, thus forfeiting his Jewish girlfriend. In the final scenario, he returns to medical school after missing the train again to Warsaw, marries Olga, a fellow student, and as doctor tries to maintain an apolitical posture. (Attempting to juggle them, he drops apples while seated at the kitchen table.) He agrees to replace a colleague who, scheduled to give a lecture in Libya, must now attend to his activist son’s arrest. Onboard the train to catch the plane, Witek hears from Olga that she is pregnant with their second child. In long-shot we see the plane explode on take-off; the man at the airport who had asked for a light for his cigarette may have detonated a bomb. Because the film had begun with a closeup of Witek screaming, it now occurs to us that the first two scenarios may have been concocted by Witek himself, in his final split second, as alternatives to his death. Freedom, therefore, is illusory; politically, the lack of self-determination seals Witek’s—and every other Pole’s—“fate.”
     Interesting though by no means stellar (although the blowup of the plane stuns), like much Kieślowski Przypadek is largely a conversation-piece: something better to talk about than to sit through. In particular, Kieślowski is embarrassingly inept at filming (simulated) sex.
     Poland’s government suppressed the film for six years.

MAN OF ASHES (Nouri Bouzid, 1986)

Young carpenter Hachemi is reluctantly headed for an arranged marriage in Nouri Bouzid’s moody, painfully oblique Rih essed, from Tunisia. It is a tale of two mentors who schematically embody two contrary sets of experiences from Hachemi’s past. One mentor continues to exert a benign influence; this is kindly Mr. Levy, a Jewish man who gives Hachemi a cherished lute as an early wedding gift although he has every intention of attending the Muslim ceremony. The other mentor is Ameur, to whom Hachemi and friend Farfat were apprenticed as boys—a man who routinely raped both of them behind closed doors. Memories of the abuse bubble up now; while Hachemi has attempted all along to transcend this sordid past, Farfat has been undone by it. “Farfat is not a man” has been scrawled on an exterior wall in the village. Protective of his friend, Hachemi wants to know who would write such a thing. Farfat claims to have written it himself, explaining, “Who has shamed his friends?” Farfat feels he is depraved because of what has been done to him. Things come to a head for both of them the night that Hachemi attempts to ease into marriage by visiting a bordello.
     Manhood is an obsessive concern for Arab males, who drench themselves in perfume and inflict their authority on women perhaps to both express and protect themselves from their own self-uncertainty. As a result, Bouzid’s film has been considered bold; but it probes nothing. Rather, it is a thin, indulgent spectacle, longer on homoerotic mood than any socio-existential insight. It is more a gesture than a film.
     It also contains a sick, flamboyant instance of adolescent cruelty: Farfat’s continuously, rapidly twirling a cat by her tail as the innocent creature screams in ghastly pain. I get it: this is how Farfat himself felt in Ameur’s clutches. But what a mentally or morally challenged person Bouzid must be to portray Farfat’s damaged soul in such a crude way.
     Most of the acting is melodramatic and atrocious.