Senteur
As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.
Hadrina
The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful
Beulah Bram
A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
MartinHafer
"No End" is one of the strangest films I have ever seen. Overall, I think I like it...but I'm not sure--especially in light of the ending that left me very cold.This film begins with one of the most interesting and striking scenes to ever start a movie. A dead man talks about his death to the audience and describes the heart attack that took him. Then, throughout the film, the man appears and watches the action. And, in a couple instances, he's seen by others or a dog! Weird, that's for sure.The dead man, Antek, was a lawyer and he was working on a very difficult case. In 1982 when the film was set, the labor union Solidarity was pushing for reforms and freedom from the Soviet- dominated government. The lawyer had been defending one of those arrested in a repressive move by the government...but his heart attack left the guy without a defense attorney. The widow, Ula, is now trying to piece together all her dead husband's notes and she becomes interested in the freedom movement. However, she also is incredibly depressed and finds her life without meaning now that he's gone. Where all this goes is very strange...very strange!This film is NOT for everyone by any stretch! It's very sexually explicit and it's also very weird, artsy as well as confusing. I can easily imagine folks hating it or loving it or, like me, are just plain baffled by it.By the way, I did find the context for the film surprising. It was made in Poland in 1985--while the country was STILL being run by the repressive Soviet-backed government of General Jaruzelski. I cannot imagine that they would have allowed such a film to be made...but it was! Also, throughout the film you keep seeing a black Labrador Retriever...and one of the characters was named Labrador. Was this a deliberate pun?
Ilpo Hirvonen
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.
denis888
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.
paul2001sw-1
Krystoff Kieslowski is today best known for his last four films, made wholly or partly in France, which in some ways is a shame, as while these movies are not without merit, they are outshone by the massive brilliance of his earlier, Polish work. Kieslowski was, of course, the greatest visual poet of communist architecture; and there's also something magical about the way he communicates the most intense emotion behind the facade of Slavic stoicism (witness, for example, in this film, the scene where the car is taken by the police). And also there was the subtext of the political beneath the personal, never more apparent than in 'No End', set (and, courageously, made) in the aftermath of the impact of the Solidarity movement on Polish society. In the face of civil unrest, the government had declared martial law, hoping to stave off a "friendly" Russian invasion; but system had lost confidence in itself, and had already effectively negotiated its own demise by the time the collapse of the Berlin wall finally cast it into oblivion. It's in this intermediate period, where normality intermingled with fear, that 'No End' unfolds, a drama that combines moral complexity and human sympathy in equal measure.The first words of dialgoue in this film are "I died". Billy Wilder had planned to start 'Sunset Boulevard' in a similar manner, but the suits didn't like it and that film makes less sense as a result of the changes they demanded. More recently, films like 'Truly, Madly, Deeply' and 'The Sixth Sense' have repeated one idea explored in 'No End', that of the ongoing relationship between the living and the dead. But whereas both of those films are weighted down by obvious sentimentality, the opening speech in 'No End' is simple, disturbing, painfully real and yet leads naturally into something far more than a ghost story, a tale in which there is no right and wrong, but in which the mixed motives of the characters only illuminate their humanity.Kieslowski is famous for his collaboration with Zbigniew Priesner, who wrote wonderful scores for this film (and all it's successors); but watching it, one is also struck by how well he used silence. He also had a talent for finding the most wonderfully expressive faces: the lawyer (Aleksander Bardini), the wife (Grazyna Szapolowska) and the client (Artus Barcis) all went on to appear in his 'Dekalog'. It's impossible to imagine a better actor than Bardini for his role; while Szapolowska appears more beautiful than any Hollywood starlet precisely because of the complete lack of glamour with which she is shot; her portrayal of a woman holding things together in the face of an unconquerable grief is wonderful and immensely sad.There are so many moments of brilliance in this film, almost of all them unflaunted; the moment where the woman's son interrupts her phone call; the tiny flinch induced when a door closes behind her, the way that light floods a previously darkened room; the speech of introduction uttered by the lawyer; Kieslowski constantly finds the subtlest of ways to shed light on his subjects. This is a ten star film, made by a master, grounded in its era but which speaks of so much more. Now released on DVD, it has to be seen.
