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
[…] No End – Kieslowski […]