No End (film)

Plot

A Polish translator, Ulla (Grażyna Szapołowska), grieves for her recently deceased lawyer husband. As she copes with her loss, the family of her husband's last client, Darek Stach, contacts her in need of legal documents and advice. Ulla struggles with caring for her son, and alternately trying to remember and to forget her husband, while Darek struggles to come to terms with his imprisonment for political dissidence. Ulla's husband's ghost observes these events, occasionally becoming visible to Ulla and Darek.

Cast

Production

The film was Kieślowski's first writing collaboration with the screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who co-wrote the screenplays for all of Kieślowski's subsequent films, and the earliest of his films with music by Zbigniew Preisner, who provided the musical score for most of Kieślowski's subsequent films. As in his later scores, Preisner's music is explicitly referenced by the characters in the film itself, in this case with the main character's son playing the theme on a piano at home.

Critical response

No End received positive critical reviews. In his review in A.V. Club, Noel Murray felt that the film deserved to be "counted among his acknowledged classics." Murray gave it an A+ rating.

In his review in Cinemania, Dan Jardine wrote, "No End is Kieslowski’s dry run for Blue, both are wrenching and beautifully-lensed studies of one woman’s struggle to deal with the death of loved ones in a larger politically-charged context. Where they differ: While similarly bleak and sorrowful, Blue finds a tortured peace, a painful hope, where No End is a giant sinkhole of despair."

In his review in the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum called the film "terse, suggestive, and pungent, with juicy performances by Bardini and Szapolowska."

On the aggregate reviewer web site Rotten Tomatoes, the film received a 90% positive rating from top reviewers based on 10 reviews, and a 77% positive rating from audience reviews based on 682 reviews.