Blind Chance (1987) A Film by Krzysztof Kieślowski

"In the beguiling but dense opening minutes of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Blind Chance, a series of succinct vignettes, arranged chronologically, but not in way that's immediately apparent as such, introduce us to Witek (Boguslaw Linda), a young Polish man. Strung together by the kind of ethereal theme music that would become a Kieślowski signature throughout the 1990s, various episodes from Witek's life play out as though the disconnected fragments of a pre-death hallucination. Among other vivid snapshots, he takes math lessons from his father, bids farewell to a childhood companion, peeps through a window as a child at an administrative meeting of some kind, kisses a girlfriend while being heckled by the occupants of a departing cargo train, and participates in an autopsy in a crowded medical room." Full review of the new Criterion disc here.

The Mill and the Cross (2011) A Film by Lech Majewski

It has become an increasingly rare occasion to be able to use the word "original" or "unique" with utter sincerity when dealing with a work of art these days, a trend attributable more to the generally clever recycling of forms and narratives as well as the oversaturated proliferation of media than it is to any (nonexistent) widespread dearth of inspiration or imagination. Lech Majewski's latest film, The Mill and the Cross, however, proves the exception to that rule. It's the kind of mysterious creation that fully, coherently, and convincingly erects its own hermetic and uncanny world that exists only for the duration of the film proper and subsequently enlarges in memory. It belongs to a special league of films that include Werckmeister Harmonies, Eraserhead, and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. This kind of spellbinding world-building does not always lead inexorably to a great film, but it nonetheless represents an exalted category of filmmaking: the ability to conjure a world that seems, at least superficially, to operate according to the laws of our own yet simultaneously feels alien and fantastical. And Majewski's film is so mystifying because it manages to take something so earthbound - Peter Bruegel's famous painting "The Way to Calvary" and the historical events surrounding it - and succeed in infusing it with an overpowering sense of the surreal.

Majewski, who has dealt with famous paintings and painters in his work before (The Garden of Earthly Delights most notably), canned the project's original conception as a traditional art history documentary to instead dive into the world in which Bruegel lived. The result is a loose, free-form exploration of the Flemish milieu and the people who inhabited it, all placed inside the context of Bruegel himself (Rutger Hauer) conceiving, planning, and painting his epic panorama, "The Way to Calvary." In charting the mundane labor of various townspeople - the miller perched high atop a forbidding rock formation, Bruegel's wife and children, the Virgin Mary (Charlotte Rampling), and various peasants and Shakespearean simpletons - as well as the devastating turmoil caused by the Spanish rejection of the Protestant Reformation, Majewski employs a languid, observational style, his unpredictable structure mirroring the slow roving of the eye across any number of Bruegel's famously packed compositions, overflowing as they were with unrelated mini-stories. Despite the sheer scope of the narrative collage, however, The Mill and the Cross maintains a light, ethereal quality even in the midst of watching red-coated conquistadors brutally torture and hang those who actively opposed Spanish rule, Jesus among them. This is a deeply spiritual work, borne from the self-imposed calm of the artist quietly observing and reflecting his surroundings.

I would probably break my back trying to describe the myriad ways in which Majewski delicately conjures the religious and political upheavals of the time and makes a case for their profound influence on Bruegel's work, but that's probably best left to a historian. I was struck most by Majewski's typically jaw-dropping approach to the material. His body of work continues to be marked by drastic technological and artistic innovations, including the 33-short-films-within-a-film approach of Blood of a Poet and the hand-held digital of The Garden of Earthly Delights. But here, Majewski takes his biggest leap yet into the domain of digital layering and CGI while keeping the painterly, tableau-like blocking of much of his work intact. The landscapes in The Mill and the Cross are composites of pieces of Bruegel's original painting and various nature footage captured on a Red One (clouds, trees, rocky mountains), creating a startling hybrid of real and unreal planes that recalls Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus (one recurring image of the God-like miller peering down upon passersby is instantly reminiscent of that film's celebrated money-shot) but goes even further in the pursuit of three-dimensionality, thinking of a backdrop not just as one homogeneous surface but rather as a compilation of many different visual elements. It makes The Mill and the Cross infinitely pleasurable to gaze at, as well as - with the exception of one digital "camera movement" during the film's impressive 4 1/2-minute choreographed shot of the collective procession towards the Crucifixion - gloriously free of the ugliness that plagues so much contemporary post-production gimmickry.



Majewski acted as co-cinematographer on the film along with Adam Sikora, and the two of them showcase an innate grasp on the quality of light in Renaissance artwork. A single source of hazy outdoor light creeps through windows to flood dusty, wooden interiors, while bare bodies tend to be encased within a soft, amorphous glow, as if brighter paint were bleeding into the dark tones of the background. This light achieves a mystical, fable-like aura, culminating in Majewski's irreverent rejection of established codes of lighting continuity by occasionally using two sources of light in one shot: that of the sun and that of the holy spirit. The film also has a special feel for composition; among plenty of iconic images captured in The Mill and the Cross, Majewski and Sikora watch two peasants climbing up a steep precipice before a majestic landscape, a mill-worker ascending his cavernous dwelling towards the light of day, two imposing gears churning like molasses in the darkness, and a group of toddlers roughhousing in their claustrophobic domestic environment, one of them cementing the timelessness and rootlessness of the armpit fart. One of Majewski's key compositional motifs is the vertical angle, underpinning the constant presence of divine observation.

In a film so heavily reliant upon the visual, peripheral aspects (narrative, sound design, acting) take a backseat in terms of emphasis, but Majewski's equally careful in dealing with each. The film's minimalist, but nonetheless multi-layered narrative, actually comes to a harmonious crescendo towards the end of the film, with each of the individual characters appearing in the massive gathering that inspired Bruegel's painting. Majewski makes no attempt to round out the stories or to bring them some sense of closure, instead preferring to subsume them into the whole and imply a cyclical movement of individual and environment. In fact, in some ways The Mill and the Cross is reminiscent of Tarkovsky's epic on painter Andrei Rublev, in that it divvies its attention up to fragments in the lives of the people surrounding the artist in question in an attempt to reflect the social inspiration that guided their work. The film's soundscape is similarly democratic, and incorporates the same principles of sampling inherent in the visual design. Combining both diegetic and non-diegetic sounds atop snatches of whispered voice-over by Rampling and periodic inserts of Józef Skrzek and Majewski's pensive, operatic score, the film pares down its aural world into something of sparse, creeping dread, occupying yet again an unsettling middle ground between the real and the unreal. This tension between a faithful representation of Bruegel's universe and something more detached is perhaps the ideal way for Majewski to impose his own singular vision onto a piece of art that is itself so exalted, influential, and majestic.

Three Colors: Blue (1993) A Film by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Krzysztof Kieslowski is a director who loves to devote a series of projects to a common theme, films that allegedly represent, or comment on, long-held ideals, like the Ten Commandments for instance. Such is again the case with his Three Colors trilogy, a set of works designed to reflect the motivations behind the three colors of the French flag. What’s interesting is how tenuous the connections are that he makes to the given ideal he is working with. It is never glaringly obvious what value his film is supposed to be illuminating; instead, Kieslowski’s films always tell rich stories of everyday occurrences which open up - through his gently poetic eye - into dense parables covering a range of existential topics, in the sense that they are such fundamental human questions that coincide with the entire thrust of life. Blue is a typically moving, immaculate work centered on the idea of a woman’s choice to either embrace a new life or continue to bitterly reject it, and this basic conceit ostensibly riffs on the notion of individual liberty.

Yet it is also a film about trauma, grief, cynicism, sensuality, love, recovery, and the elusiveness of truth. Kieslowski gives equal weight to all of these themes, and has something sophisticated and unique to say about each. Warranting equal praise is the radiant Juliette Binoche, who subtly breathes tangible life into these ineffable qualities through a range of distinctive facial expressions and gestures. She plays Julie Courcy, a woman who loses her husband and young daughter in one of the earliest scenes of the film in an unexplainable car crash in the middle of the French countryside. Miraculously, Julie survives the accident only to come out of a coma and discover her family is dead. She is immediately disillusioned, unable to come to terms with the sudden loss of what is most dear to her. The only family she has left is her bemused mother (Emmanuelle Riva) who sits in a nursing home all day with her eyes glued to the TV watching images of people tightrope walking and bungee jumping, a clear symbolic parallel to Julie’s own life, teetering on the edge of total neglect to the point where she is nothing more than a blank figure. Her partly blind mother claims to be able to see the whole world in the TV, an ironic counterpoint to Julie’s own temporary immunity to life’s pleasures.

Julie’s husband was one of the world’s most distinguished symphony composers, so his death is not only a private tragedy but also a public one. Images of him and Julie flood the media, and this ubiquity does not alleviate Julie’s grief, especially when journalists begin questioning her against her will about the rumors that she was actually the real composer of most of his work. Julie strives to become a non-presence after resurrecting a long stagnate attraction to a neighbor named Olivier (Benoît Régent), only augmenting her sorrow after sleeping with him. She empties out her home and relocates to the middle of Paris, deliberately not informing anyone she knows about her decision in an attempt to free herself from all connections to the world, be it material or psychological, and immerse herself in anonymity. Kieslowski materializes this deep grief with a series of quiet, morose scenes that are light on dialogue but heavy on expressive close-ups. One specifically effective scene has Julie sitting at her piano for the last time, lethargically playing one of her husband's compositions with one hand. The camera cuts back and forth between softly focused tracking shots across the written music and shots of Binoche's barren visage, set to a creepy piercing piano. The scene culminates with Julie slowly sliding her hand down the piano top until it crashes down violently, the final time she expects to personally commit her husband's work to audible music.



It is not, however, the last time she hears the music, for she finds that it repeatedly reverberates in her head during late-night swims at an ethereally electric blue pool. Being able to hear the voluptuous symphonic movements, replete with flutes, violins, and piano, gradually assuages Julie back into an admiration of the sensuous textures of life. The sweeping music also coincides with her reacquired love for small surface pleasures such as the taste of coffee (Kieslowski watches a sugar cube become slowly consumed by liquid), her family's blue jewels that she hangs from her living room, and the warm, irresistible urge for human companionship (she gains a friendship with an emotionally feral stripper living in her apartment complex). Julie even learns a shattering truth about her husband that she did not know before his death, but she does not grow bitter. It is significant that at the height of this re-emergence, Julie dives into the pool and floats in a fetal position for an extended moment, as if she's truly being reborn. She successfully completes her grieving state, although the potent sense of melancholy remains through the very last frame of the film.

Blue, like The Double Life of Véronique, is an aesthetic revelation, a fusion of sight and sound that is flawlessly immersive. Kieslowski is a master of evoking inner states purely through cryptic visuals, subtle transformations of light, and shocking editing rhythms. As usual, he works with cinematographer Slawomir Idziak, who seems to always adopt his languorous visual storytelling style effortlessly, lighting the sets and actors in a way that is perpetually attuned to the natural changes in light over the course of a day, yet is also somehow vaguely unnatural. Zbigniew Preisner matches the grandiosity and intimacy of his score for Double Life, and Binoche captivates in what may be her finest and most emotionally rich performance. The humanity in Blue is also endlessly rewarding; as a story that could have become positively grim, instead it maintains an understanding of the possibility of second chances, of starting anew in life without forgetting the pleasures of the past.

The Double Life of Veronique (La double vie de Véronique) A Film by Krzysztof Kieslowski (1991)

The Double Life of Veronique is a film that hinges entirely on ineffable qualities: the interconnectedness of humanity, dual personalities, alternative realities, mysticism, sensation, attraction. That Krzysztof Kieslowski manages to meld what are perhaps some of the most difficult themes to convey through cinema into a light, tonally spectacular work of art is in itself an act of miracle. The film is best viewed as a phenomenological experience, an invitation to soak the senses in sight and sound purely, resist cognitive processes and the inevitable urge to deconstruct a linear narrative, and simply engage. It is, then, the fault of Kieslowski's that there does exist a smoke and mirrors act within the core of the film, a jumbled puzzle that requests putting together. At the same time, this puzzle is not so much convoluted as it is grounded in the very patterns of the film, solved best through resistance to the elliptical ebbs and flows.

The film tells an outwardly complex narrative, written by Kieslowski and his longtime script collaborator, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, of two young women who are existential copies of each other. Introduced first is Weronika, a Polish soprano. Weronika is a woman delighted by the simplistic textures of life; indeed, there a few better examples of female ecstasy in cinema as those of Weronika proudly finishing the final note during an outdoor choir practice while rain beats down on her face in close-up, or lifting her head joyfully as dust caroms off the ceiling wherein she deflected her favorite transparent bouncy ball. Furthermore, she has an unexplainable certainty that she is not alone in the world, that her pleasures and pains are being mirrored by someone else, and this notion is validated when she witnesses her doppelgänger boarding a bus in a market square amidst a public riot. Unfortunately, she is invariably discovering sharp pains in her chest, which eventually, when she persists at singing in a performance for a distinguished music school, claims her life.

As a result, Veronique, her French double, quits her singing career. She begins feeling a heavy grief for something which she cannot put a finger on. Her life as a music schoolteacher continues, but it becomes invested with routine because she is far too preoccupied by her otherworldly emotions. When a children's book writer comes to Veronique's school to put on a marionette show, she becomes infatuated by the glimpse she gets of the man via a reflection on the wall beside the stage. Once again, Veronique is able to see and feel that which is invisible to others, and her subsequent love for the puppeteer is a further inquiry into the enigmatic quality of Veronique's character, of her uncommon ability to harbor feelings for those things that she has no concrete certainty of, and of her omnipresent brushes against transcendence.



Both characters are played by Irene Jacob, a young actress who previously had only a minor part in Louis Malle's Au Revoir, Les Enfants. Despite this lack of experience, Jacob shows an amazing ability to imbue her performance with multivalent gazes and quietly expressive physicality, sacred qualities that are most often only discussed when dealing with veteran actors. While she plays two sexually active characters, her true pleasure seems to always come from an outside source, a difficult complexity to convey. Late in the film, when she finally connects with the puppeteer through a nifty sound recording he sent her as a way of testing for a forthcoming novel the psychological likelihood of a complete stranger following a path to another stranger, the two have passionately emotional sex, but Jacob's intense expression seems to be out of the moment, as if she's really using the act as either a way of reciprocating her beliefs in coincidence or even connecting on a higher level with her deceased double (after all, the two make love in the same hotel room that Weronika's boyfriend said he was staying in earlier in the film). Rarely does a character emote so profoundly, and perhaps never have I felt so much love for a two-dimensional person as I do for Irene Jacob in The Double Life of Veronique.

Kieslowski and his cinematographer, Slawomir Idziak, the cameraman for his visually enticing A Short Film About Killing, are constantly finding innovative ways to emphasize both the mystical worlds of Weronika and Veronique and the inherent self-reflexivity of a film with such a title. Most discernibly, the film has a warm, soothing color palette of olive greens and deep reds. The colors rarely have specific physical beginning and ending points on screen, but rather flow together like liquids. The most telling example of this fluidity comes in an abstract shot that reimagines Weronika's death aside an amorphous red haze. In contrast, the exterior shots of Polish streets have a dullness in response to the green filter, as if the life has been sucked out of them. Such emptiness is not as extreme as it is in A Short Film About Killing, but it nonetheless provides a coldness to compliment Weronika's impending death. Also, glass becomes a central motif in the film, with the ponderous images of Weronika and Veronique frequently reflected against windows to suggest the more faint replica of themselves. Then there is the repetitious use of the aforementioned opaque bouncy ball, which reflects the world as in a silver globe. The camerawork has an impressive elasticity, jumping from eye-catching tableaux shots to abstract, dynamic micro images. Finally, the sound is designed to amplify minor details, completing the magnificent aesthetic which manages to achieve a sensually heightened world.

Kieslowski's film, though, when it comes down to it, does not need to be analyzed too thickly. It is determinedly metaphysical, and it curiously succeeds at transmitting the ineffable feelings of the unknown, of the indescribable attractions we all have towards others, and of an entirely separate reality existing on the opposite side of a thin piece of glass. Although it contains an occasionally contrived plot point (the ability of Veronique's friend to systematically remember that the puppeteer was a children's book writer and that she even owns one of his books), the overall rhythm it forges is too powerful to resist. Most importantly, it is a stunningly beautiful, palpably sensual piece of work, and one of the few masterpieces I dare to name.