Memorable, crazy movie

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Absolutely Fantastic

Blistering performances.

The story depicts a lady's dealing with grief of her husband's sudden demise. How a lady makes many efforts to come to terms with the reality. A story told with honesty and sincerity and without any judgement.The brilliance of both the direction and the acting is seen in its simplicity. Many intense montages are shown with no suggestions (no exaggerated expressions and lilts in the background musical score). The director leaves that to be felt by the audience directly. That respect given to the audience is uncommon in today's mainstream Hindi cinema.The portrayal of grief and despair is intense and direct. The storyteller offers no balm that doesn't exist. How a store starts and ends is of course a raconteur's choice, yet their effort to do so non-judgementally is authentic-and original.The movie plot develops in the backdrop of Solidarity movement in Poland. The political background is delicately woven which enriches-and doesn't disturb-story's progress.Watch the movie in a positive frame of mind to appreciate the finnesse of the story.So many great stuff to absorb and reflect beyond Hindi and English literature and cinema.

The films by Krzysztof Kieslowski can be separated into two parts; the Polish films and the international films. The Polish films were concrete and filled with the mirthless Polish reality. The international films (the last four) were much more absurd, ethereal and characterized with aesthetic styling. In 1985 Kieslowski was already very appreciated in the European art-house cinema due to his international breakthrough, Camera Buff in 1979. No End was his first film with the screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz and composer Zbigniew Presiner, with whom he continued working in all of his later film.Poland is under martial law and Solidarity is banned. A woman's (Ula) husband suddenly dies, who was a lawyer of an opposition activist. After his death Ula realizes how much he meant to her and begins to love him more and more. The activist needs another lawyer and Ula recommends an older more experienced lawyer, who has a much more calm approach. While the trial goes on Ula tries to get rid of the ghost of her husband. She tries hypnosis, sex and oblivion - but in the end is forced to commit a suicide - the only way out.A very overwhelming thing in No End is the fact that Ula must commit a suicide. There is no other way out of the system, there is no end for the yearning of love and peace. Killing herself and leaving her young boy alone is the only way for her to live, to have peace and to get rid of the ghost. The last shot where she walks among her husband is very paradoxical.Krzysztof Kieslowski says in his interview book, Kieslowski on Kieslowski that it was very hard to get No End on the screens. WFD (The Government's documentary film office), which usually allowed and financed the films in Poland, wasn't interested. It didn't want a film to show Poland giving false sentences under martial law. After Kieslowski got the production rolling with Piesiewicz WFD didn't want to pay the salaries for the cast & crew. Kieslowski had to go there himself to demand them to pay for their work - at the same he, of course, denied to take money for himself. When the film finally was ready the Government, the church and the critics hated it and it was very hard to see. But the audience, the people who actually saw it loved it. They said that it was the best description anyone had made about the martial law in Poland.Watching No End today is very interesting and I think it has gained more value in the course of time. It's an incredibly realistic description of its time and it shows how sad things were back then. "During the martial law we all weighed our heads. And my generation never raised its head back up." Krzysztof Kieslowski. Even that I am familiar with kieslowskian pessimism and it can be seen in all of his films, I think No End is his most pessimistic picture of the Polish reality. The whole movie and especially the ending shows us that there is no hope and No End for all this.Kieslowski said that the biggest flaw of No End was that it had three separate parts and it didn't work as an entirety. The political part, where the activist tries to choose whether to fight or fall. The emotional part, where the woman falls in love with a dead man and finally the metaphysical part, where the dead man takes contact with the living. I think all of these different things work brilliantly and do no harm on the film. Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy, which tries to explain the fundamental nature of being and to my mind in addition to this Kieslowski tried to study the true nature of love.The acting and the cinematography of No End is very raw, brutal documentary. This incredible concreteness Kieslowski was able to achieve in Dekalog and No End was because of his long experience with documentaries, which he had made seven of. The nature of the film changed during the process; in the beginning Kieslowski intended to make a film about guilt and at sometime he was going to title the film, Happy Ending due to its final shot with the man and the woman walking together. But in the end No End is a philosophical film, a picture of reality and its time, a paradox of politics and a study of the true nature of love.As is the film so is the title very complex and it has many purposes. I think the title works for all of the three different parts. There is No End for the martial law and oppression; the activist is unable to fight against the Government. Nor is there end for the being of man and the love of the woman. There is No End in sight.

This is a real pleasure to both eye and mind. The untimely demised Mr. Kislowski was a true genius of Polish cinema and with this excellent film he again proves it. The film is divided into two genres, if it may be said so - one is a mystic one, where we see the ghost of a dead Warsawa lawyer, Antek, when he watches his widow and his little son and their life from the ether and the only creature that sees him is a big black dog. The other plot is a deeply tragic and serious story about 1982's Poland, when the anti-Communist political movement called Solidarnosc (the Solidarity) was banned, the country suffered curfews, arrests and political trials.The widow of Antek, Ulla, is a famous translator, and she is devastated with her husband's death. She starts to help the wife of a man who is in prison, who was in Solidarnosc's actions and who was Antek's client. So, now that Antek is dead, another lawyer, his teacher, an elderly man takes the case, and his young assistant also helps him. The story tells us about the small and still tragic events of their lives. We see the unbent Solidarnosc activists, who meet secretly in their shabby apartments. We see Ulla's soul struggle when she is rushing from one extreme to another, having a quick date with an American, having help from the Solidarity people, having troubled relations with Antek's friend. We see and feel her pain, her mute suffering and her constant plea for her late husband. Finally, when the case is won, and that young man is released right during the trial, Ulla decides to take her life and finally join Antek. The cast is superb, we see young Marek Kondrat among others, we see other great actors and we feel the same pain they all suffer in those bleak, cold, merciless days of repressions and purges. A serious, earnest film for all who think.

the movie seems to state it's "thing" directly at least twice: when urszula reads antek's notes to labrador, and in the poem read aloud by labrador near the end. for the longest time i couldn't find subtitles for it but my reason for wanting to see it so much i watched the first time without them was no, not b/c i liked "Blue", but b/c jerzy radziwilowicz is foxy. this was a good thing though, seeing it once without much grasp of the dialogue and once with nearly all of it available in translation made the way the dialogue turned so many of the scenes on their head stand out a lot, so i don't know how much the effect would have stood out seeing it all at once. the second time seeing it being much easier also, and made so many small things that happen in the movie turn up, including a couple of details i'm sure i would have understood if i simply had a regular amount of the context i think the movie's audience would be assumed to have. as a whole it felt a little like i'd been walking neck-deep in an immense but somewhat deceptively smooth river. when the movie was over it felt like it had been physically heavy, leaving one a little wobbly. but this is how it can feel when you become stretched between things going on and relationships. popular wisdom (over here anyway) tries to say one is more Real, and the other steals from this, but as much as this is true in some sense it is also from a perspective of either luxury or detachment. when labrador is hoping to coach darek's wife in getting her husband to break the hunger strike, he asks her, do you want him free? her answer seems to convey that stretch, "he'd kill me" (figuratively) isn't just about how he'd respond to her betraying this thing he's fighting for, it's not as simple as he's neglecting his family for this thing. everyone lives in that thing, labrador's assistant conveys another facet of it, which you can immediately see is selfish when he talks to darek, but so what? the hypnotherapist seems to point to other dimensions of the emotional toll of this paradox, and at the same time the sessions almost seem to concentrate a feeling spread throughout the movie. something about the vulnerability of the living characters in the setting of the movie, there's almost a feeling like everyone's sleepwalking but the dead. i'm guessing that is how someone like myself, who can only guess, picks up the movie's expression of the feeling of the systematic oppression in the setting of the movie. no end?