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No End

No End (1987)

March. 06,1987
|
7.4
| Drama

1982, Poland. A translator loses her husband and becomes a victim of her own sorrow. She looks to sex, to her son, to law, and to hypnotism when she has nothing else in this time of martial law when Solidarity was banned.

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himanshutri
1987/03/06

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.

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chaos-rampant
1987/03/07

I've began to follow Kieslowski over the past days, hoping to finally encounter his color films which I've seen for years pop up among the brilliant works. I watched this as background glimpse into his formative period. Interestingly he does two things:One is he presents a world that has come undone and carries the past. A woman, her husband has died as the film begins, life has broken down and she has to go out and face it. Everything that she encounters is an echo from the past. Two instances that involve photos exemplify it; nude photos of her that her husband had found but he's now gone before she had a chance to explain, the other shows an idyllic summer that he possibly spent with another woman (before they met?). But also an old friend who now vies for her, a night of prostituting herself because he reminds her of her husband, being hypnotized to forget him conjures his presence, and round it goes from bewilderment to epiphany.The other thing they do here is look to frame a response to bewilderment felt by Poles who had just been through strikes and martial law. A man is awaiting trial, different narratives are offered up by lawyers. Should he be pragmatic or protest? It's one of the threads that were left undone at the time of the husband's death who was a lawyer on the case. His own advice, which I perceive to be Kieslowski's, is for everyone to remove the distortions that prevent them from seeing each other.Viewers who are content to encounter a life of episodic confusion will be happy with what he does. I miss a more penetratingly visual way of threading these events and, already from my brief glimpses into Dekalog, I believe it's this ability to surround and submerge causality that he's going to cultivate, a way of dreaming in advance. Here, tellingly, we have the husband announcing his own death in the very first shot whereas it could have been threaded as discovery and glimpsed in a haze (he already tries this by the first episode of Dekalog).

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MartinHafer
1987/03/08

"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?

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zetes
1987/03/09

The narrative in this film is far too flawed. There are two intertwining halves of it, one good, one poor. The good one involves a woman, Ulla, whose husband died suddenly and unexpectedly one morning while he waited in his car to take their son to school. Now he gently haunts his family as they deal with the pain. The acting is magnificent here. Kieslowski is masterful at directing his actors in material like this, as he would show a million different times in The Decalogue, made a few years later. There are a few outrageously and subtly powerful scenes. Most memorable is the one where Ulla decides to prostitute herself to a British tourist. This happens about a month after her husband has died. After the man has sex with her, she asks him if he speaks Polish. He says no, and then she begins to talk about her problems in Polish. The other half of the plot is utterly weak in comparison. The husband was a lawyer, and the defendant in the case he was working on is screwed because of the death. The defendant's wife comes to Ulla for help, and though she is refused help at first, Ulla eventually introduces her to her husband's mentor, a cynical old man about to be kicked out of the business. Perhaps it's just my aversion to lawyer and courtroom dramas, but I just didn't care a lick what happened in this part of the plot. Supposedly it's meant as a criticism against the Communist law at the time. I don't know. It's dull whatever it is. But the film is slightly worth watching, especially for the acting. Even in the parts that I didn't care for, the acting is exquisite. 7/10.

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