• Kieslowski’s fourth feature (made after but released third ahead of Blind Chance)- and four for four in the archives. This is an important first collaboration with co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz who would go on to work with Kieslowski on his remaining (and best) work
  • An impressive opening scene- the posthumous voice-over of Jerzy Radziwilowicz’s Anek staring at the camera (so he’s on screen as a sort of ghost, not like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard) with Grazyna Szapolowska’s Urzula, his wife, lying on the bed in grief and the scene transitions to her
  • This isn’t the Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore Ghost 1990 film but he does slap a watch out of a lawyer’s hands, writes a question mark on a document in red ink and we get the dog barking at an empty car. This is a story of pain, politics. You almost wonder why Bergman hasn’t made this film before- intellectual, European art-house cinema with religious themes, verbal cruelty and existential angst
  • There’s a great scene where Urzula makes love with a stranger in her grief and then confesses to him in another language on purpose when she finds out he doesn’t speak any Polish. She visits a hypnotist, she is translating Orwell—and that dystopian fog pervades
  • There’s a subplot with an older jaded lawyer and a political prisoner—the death of his cause parallels her spiral and actual death
  • The film ends dark, angry- again like an early 1960’s Bergman film
  • Walking off together final image
  • Recommend but not in the top 10 of 1985