Przypadek (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1981)

Blind Chance was banned by the Polish authorities in the last days of state communism, probably as much for its mild sexual content as for its anti-totalitarian views. When considering the peaks of Kieslowski's output, the ban is not actually much of a blow: we've been in the world of the butterfly effect since to better effect, even in the outright rip-off Sliding Doors, which steals this film's conceit that the main character either succeeding or failing to catch a train would change the whole of their subsequent life, and is at once more mediocre in intellectual content and yet better in coherence. The problem here is that while Blind Chance is bursting with philosophical ideas about religion, predestiny and freedom, their collation is such a muddle that characters merge into each other and any finesse in why its three parallel universes diverge so drastically from each other is quite lost. It's not the great director's most lucid hour.

5/10