Blind Chance

Witek, a medical student, runs after a train pulling out of the station in Lodz. The film then tells what follows three times. He catches it, meets an old party member and joins the Communist Party, and his posting to France is cancelled. In the second version he misses the train, scuffles with an official, is arrested, is baptised and works with the anti-Communist underground, where his loyalty is questioned too. In the third he collides with nobody on the platform, misses the train again and runs into Olga from medical school. He stays out of politics, finishes his studies and builds a quiet life, and at the end the plane he boards explodes in mid-air. Krzysztof Kieslowski directed. The film was finished in 1981 but the Polish authorities would not release it, and it only came out six years later, in 1987. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 73 percent. It is credited with influencing later films including Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run. The director Agnieszka Holland called it perhaps the best and the most original of Kieslowski's work, and said later films flat-out stole the concept while losing its philosophical depth. Who it is for: viewers drawn to the question of how chance builds a life, and to Poland in the eighties. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the three branches to resolve. The film ranks none of them above the others and ends all three badly.