No End (1984) review

The spectre of a dead lawyer appears near and around his surviving wife, who mourns for him by engaging in empty sex (the best kind!) with a tourist and spends her days looking distracted and forlorn. The closest parallel to this is Kieslowski's Blue - which a lot of professional critics have compared it to - and since I didn't like that film very much it's no surprise that I fail to be overwhelmed by this: the case the lawyer was working on apparently had major implications for Polish society, but the way the film is written - by cutting back and forth between the case and the woman's depression - negates the effect of both key parts (the legal bout is treated with the same dreariness the woman feels; even victories are pointless and all is ultimately lost). Camus and Orwell are both name-checked, and it's the same kind of bleak worldview of those two thinkers that causes this to succumb to its own overbearing gloom.