the movie seems to state it's "thing" directly at least twice: when urszula reads antek's notes to labrador, and in the poem read aloud by labrador near the end. for the longest time i couldn't find subtitles for it but my reason for wanting to see it so much i watched the first time without them was no, not b/c i liked "Blue", but b/c jerzy radziwilowicz is foxy. this was a good thing though, seeing it once without much grasp of the dialogue and once with nearly all of it available in translation made the way the dialogue turned so many of the scenes on their head stand out a lot, so i don't know how much the effect would have stood out seeing it all at once. the second time seeing it being much easier also, and made so many small things that happen in the movie turn up, including a couple of details i'm sure i would have understood if i simply had a regular amount of the context i think the movie's audience would be assumed to have. as a whole it felt a little like i'd been walking neck-deep in an immense but somewhat deceptively smooth river. when the movie was over it felt like it had been physically heavy, leaving one a little wobbly. but this is how it can feel when you become stretched between things going on and relationships. popular wisdom (over here anyway) tries to say one is more Real, and the other steals from this, but as much as this is true in some sense it is also from a perspective of either luxury or detachment. when labrador is hoping to coach darek's wife in getting her husband to break the hunger strike, he asks her, do you want him free? her answer seems to convey that stretch, "he'd kill me" (figuratively) isn't just about how he'd respond to her betraying this thing he's fighting for, it's not as simple as he's neglecting his family for this thing. everyone lives in that thing, labrador's assistant conveys another facet of it, which you can immediately see is selfish when he talks to darek, but so what? the hypnotherapist seems to point to other dimensions of the emotional toll of this paradox, and at the same time the sessions almost seem to concentrate a feeling spread throughout the movie. something about the vulnerability of the living characters in the setting of the movie, there's almost a feeling like everyone's sleepwalking but the dead. i'm guessing that is how someone like myself, who can only guess, picks up the movie's expression of the feeling of the systematic oppression in the setting of the movie. no end?
Review of No End
