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Another of the selections on TCM Imports that was about to expire from my DVR was one of director Krzysztof Kieślowski's films from his native Poland before he want to France and did the Three Colors trilogy, a mid-1980s film called No End. So, I watched it before it expired and wrote of this post, although the post itself probably isn't going up until after the movie expires since I'm several weeks ahead in writing posts.

The movie was released in 1985, but is set at the beginning of 1983. Antek Zyro is a Polish lawyer who has just died, and he shows up at the beginning of the film to tell us how he died of a heart attack while driving his car, and how his spirit was able to see his late wife Urszula (nicknamed Ula which is how she's referred to in the movie) and young son Jacek, as well as witness his own funeral. In fact, one of the themes of the movie is how Ula thinks she caa n sense Antek's presence and that he may be there as a ghost.

Antek was a lawyer, and one at a particularly difficult point in Polish history (and indeed, I'm surprised the movie was even able to be made in mid-1980s Poland). Poland was of course part of the communist bloc at this time, but there were rumblings against the regime. The workers' protests at the Gdańsk shipyards that led to the Solidarity trade union happened in 1980, and the government eventually responded in late 1981 by putting the country under martial law and a curfew among other repressive measures. In the movie, Darek Stach is a blue-collar worker who bristled under these restrictions and, with the rest of his co-workers, wanted to organize a strike. He was arrested, and it's Darek's case that Antek was working on at the time of his death.

One day not long after Antek's death, Ula gets a call from Joanna, who is the wife of Darek. She knows that Antek had files on Darek's case, and perhaps Darek was able to secret away some material that the communist authorities have been searching for in the apartments of Darek and other people around him. She's also looking for help from Ula, perhaps to find a good attorney who can take the case. That latter obligation eventually falls to Labrador, under whom Darek had clerked back in the 1970s after finishing law school. However, some people question whether Labrador is the right man for the job. One of those people might even be Antek himself: in going through Antek's files, Ula sees there's now suddenly a red question mark next to Labrador's name that she's convinced wasn't there the last time she looked at the file.

Ula goes to a hypnotherapist to try to get Antek's ghost out of her mind, but it doesn't really work. Meanwhile, she and everybody else involved in Darek's case is putting herself into more danger because of the political situation in the country.

There's a lot going on in No End, and to be honest, I'm not certain that all of it works, such as the character who had met Antek before he married Ula, and the nude pictures of Ula. But I think that on the whole, a lot more works here than goes wrong. Despite the opening, the movie develops a bit slowly, but more in a way that intelligent dramas did. The material here is to me definitely more accessible than arthouse. No End is, despite some flaws, a film that's absolutely worth watching.