This is part of a series of films based on the Biblical Ten Commandments: The Decalogue. Kieslowski's modern parables trace, in the contemporary world, man's tendency to transgress and to topple the moral foundations upon which rests human civilization.
Tom (19) covets an elder woman, Magdelene, with an obsession that acquires increasingly frightening proportions. He watches her through binoculars, telephones her, rings her doorbell, working as a milkman, spies upon her when her lovers visit her...
At the beginning of the film, Kieslowski dwells at length on the lovelessness of the modern world, Magdelene's loveless sessions of love making and Tom's inability to care for his landlady. Even Tom's love for Magdelene is undercut by his intrusion into her private affairs. But when Magdelene begins her conversation with Tom, the film slowly begins to retrieve the lost meaning of love: love that is devoid of the distortions of modern living, love that holds life together.
In one of the definitive statements about the inherent voyeurism of the viewing lens, the film deals with the voyeuristic quality of the cinema apparatus. Just as the film is frightening in its emphasis upon this, so it is equally, if not more, liberating in the reaffirmation of Kieslowski's faith in love and its necessity in our daily life.
This double edge of the film is reflected in images that are amazingly precise and that yet incorporate the blurring of the edges of the frame, and the use of dark shadows. Kieslowski uses colors with their allegorical associations within Christian theology and art practice, while using different degrees of saturation and dispersion.
Kieslowski is among those modern filmmakers who are least ambiguous about what they want to say - the meaning of the parables in his Decalogue is exact. Only, what they are speaking about is filled with the ambiguities and indecision of the modern world. What Kieslowski seems to affirm at the end is that, despite the voyeuristic qualities of the cinema apparatus or cinema narrative, genuine artistic creation is possible through transcendence in love and self-realization.
Krzsysztot Kieslowski - A Profile
In the late 1970s, when the conflict between the State and the citizens of Poland was imminent, a new trend emerged in cinematography - the "cinema of moral unrest". Kieslowski is among the great filmmakers representing this tendency. Starting with realist documentaries, he made his first feature film in 1979. Kieslowki's work culminated in a TV cycle and two films, with subjects from the Ten Commandemnts.
A Short Film About Killing is based on the 5th commandment, while A Short Film About Love comes from the sixth. Both films and the TV cycle are anchored in the present, and express the necessity of a moral revival, both of the individual and the society, in a world which may be determined by chance, but which does not deliver us from the right and the duty of moral choice. More recently, he has made the remarkable Three Colors trilogy.
Poland/1988/Color/90min
Direction: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Cast: Grazyna Szapotowska (Magdalene), Olaf Lubaszenko (Tom)
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