Kieslowski gives us a tapestry of interwoven stories in this, his last turn. I welcome films of this kind that go on to show how, if no life exists in isolation, then our troubles don't either, they have roots that surge forward and back, and so there's a road that leads out of the thicket.
Blue was about memory, how the past surfaces to color reality. White was about desire, how the imagined future surfaces to color reality. This is something else, even more penetrating in its coloration of reality, in my opinion the best of the three and Kieslowski's crowning jewel. He would retire after.
It begins with an opening shot of phone wires running between interconnected lives, carrying voices and stories that circle the ether. We then begin with two lives on the same street and how they begin to interconnect. One of the ensuing threads is self- referential about Kieslowski.
A chance confluence of stories brings a young woman to the house of an old man, Kieslowski himself. Retired "judge" and spends his time eavesdropping in the lives of people, inserting himself as observer of stories. In his days as judge he similarly inserted himself in the stories of people brought before him, deciding right from wrong. Now he no longer feels the need to arrive at verdicts, he simply observes the coming and going.
One scene revolves around her discovering his habit and how it's a wretched thing to do. How dare he insinuate himself in the secrets of people? Also self-referential, Kieslowski critiquing the job of presuming to know peoples' innermost selves.
Better than personal commentary, this is self-referential in a larger way about observing and living a life that has to make sense of how stories and images surround us. Kieslowski does some of his best work in ushering us along that path, all of the Dekalog pays off here.
The old man not just as cynically indifferent observer but as someone who has given up on life, broken by something in his past. Now he has taken up the habit of vicariously inhabiting other peoples' stories as substitute for a lack of his own. What we have is a narrator at the center of narratives. Someone who is burdened with the memory of dashed dreams. Someone who lives in the mind, the mind as this house of fictions.
The way Kieslowski decenters the reality of what happens next is magical. Something more mysterious is starting to take place, isn't it?
Not all narratives are innocuous the old man shows us, or express a simple truth. There's a neglected old mother somewhere who lies to her daughter about having a heart- attack to get her to visit. In a court that punished lying she would be found guilty; but she only wants the company of her daughter. We see here how narratives (including dreams and memory) are extensions of self, ways of bringing close to us something we need.
And then Kieslowski shifts again. Only now can he begin to show us how not everything that we see is actually taking place. He makes it a point for example to reveal that he never climbed on the top floor of her house like in the bizarre scene that we saw earlier (he saw her in a mirror). The book didn't fly open to a certain page in the middle of a street but in an auditorium.
Some of it may be an old man's story that reinvents in order to reveal, some of it might be dreamlike fantasy. But precisely the point isn't to say what is true and what not. To decide what is true would be to show a great lack of humility, the judge says. The sailor in his story may have been guilty; but not convicting him allowed him to live a peaceful life.
It culminates in a marvelous scene in an empty theater with doors flying open by the wind. But the way Kieslowski has decentered us from rigid truth, we can surge through a whole life to see many possible ones now. Is this his dream from 20 years later and he's going to wake up next to her? Is it a confrontation between her and him about an affair, taking on this dreamlike shape? Is it about finding her or losing her?
Lynch was not forthcoming about whether or not Kieslowski was an influence when bluntly asked. But I believe that part of Inland Empire is set in Lodz (where Kieslowski went to film school) for a reason, a more eloquently playful acknowledgement. He would take us so very far.
