Blind Chance - Reception

Reception

Critical response

As an example of Kieślowski's characters intersecting with history, Kickasola points out that Witek, who has the same birthdate (though not year) as Kieślowski (June 27, 1952), "ponders the irony of his 1956 birth date." In 1981, Kieślowski announced he planned to develop the realist convention as "deeper, not wider." With Blind Chance, Kieślowski "put his new philosophy partially into practice," but this film "still relies heavily on the political circumstances of Polish society to set the theme." Paul Coates describes this film "as marrying a near-psychoanalytic 'Western' preoccupation with the effects of the death of the father ... to a typically 'East European' reluctance to renounce humanism by invoking such psychoanalytic scenarios as the Oedipal one."

In their interviews on the DVD (both region 1 and 2), Agnieszka Holland and writer Annette Insdorf identify Sliding Doors as a film influenced by Blind Chance. In both films, the outcome hinges on whether or not the protagonist catches a train, but in Sliding Doors, only two scenarios are presented (protagonist catches the train, doesn't catch it). Run Lola Run does not involve trains, but is similar to Blind Chance in that three scenarios are presented hinging on how the protagonist negotiates a mad dash through a crowded space.

In Blind Chance the outcome of the life of the protagonist depends on how he handles the situation with the beer drinking fellow. In Run Lola Run, Lola had no choice. Her life depends on external factors. Her life changes because she is at the same place but a few seconds later. And so, she either runs under a car or she can just avoid it.

In Blind Chance, circumstances lead Witek to have a different character in each plot, echoed in Run Lola Run by the photographic montages shown of the people Lola passes along the way. First Witek is a communist, then a religious anticommunist, and finally he is apolitical.

The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival.

Awards and nominations

• 1987 Polish Film Festival Silver Lion Award (Krzysztof Kieślowski) Won
• 1987 Polish Film Festival Best Actor Award (Boguslaw Linda) Won