If you've seen the Dekalog VI version of A Short Film About Love, this extended theatrical version goes in a completely different direction. Although not based in reality, Kieślowski weaves an ending that somehow bores innocence and purity out of young man's obsession and a world weary woman's disdain. How he pulls this feat off is beyond me...but he does.
There are times when this harsh world needs its share of fairytales, and A Short Film About Love was Kieślowski's poem to his native Poland before moving his base of operation to France. This is probably my favorite film of his, although nothing aches quite like Bleu. Enjoy the film.
From Stephen Holden at The New York Times:
If every film director has a streak of the peeping tom, every actor who agrees to appear in a movie becomes an exhibitionist in a voyeuristic collaboration. That is the deadpan joke that ripples from the heart of "A Short Film About Love," a taut, psychological drama made in 1988 by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski.
Where movies have traditionally treated voyeurism as sneaky detective work with an erotic frisson, "A Short Film About Love" has the temerity to present it as an intensely romantic enterprise. Everything takes on a magical aura when it is contemplated through a lens, this icy film reminds us. It also suggests that romantic love itself is a mystery that requires distance for the imagination to construct and sustain what is essentially an illusion.
The film, which opens today at Cinema Village, presents its peeping-tom protagonist, Tomik (Olaf Lubaszenko), not as a dirty young man but as an earnest romantic supplicant who is too shy to plead his cause to the woman he loves. A virginal 19-year-old postal worker who lives with the mother of a friend in a sterile apartment complex, Tomik spends hours monitoring the love life of Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska), an attractive older woman who entertains her lovers in a neighboring apartment that doesn't seem to have window shades. During his months of observation, he has fallen obsessively in love with her, and his emotional involvement escalates one evening when he watches her arrive home and collapse into sobs.
Tomik isn't just a passive spy: he is a harassing one. While watching Magda, he pesters her with anonymous phone calls. He slips bogus money orders into her mailbox to lure her to the post office, and pilfers a stack of her personal mail. He even takes a second job as a milkman so he can drop bottles off at her door in the hope of seeing her. One evening, he reports a bogus gas leak in her apartment so that repairmen will arrive in time to interrupt a tryst.
When Tomik eventually gives himself away, Magda is flattered enough by his adoration to invite him home, where she casually offers herself to him. The movie is tantalizingly vague about her motives. But her nonchalance throws Tomik into a tailspin, and he rushes back to his apartment and slashes his wrists. The tables are turned while he recovers in the hospital, and Magda, desperate for his return, begins obsessively monitoring his apartment through a pair of opera glasses.
This highly schematic film isn't entirely successful in making the leap from cinematic theory to psychological realism. If Tomik exudes a puppy-dog pathos, Magda's tolerance of his harassment, once he confesses his deeds, defies all credibility. And when Tomik's stern, practical landlady finds herself drawn to spy through his telescope, the movie pushes its vision of urban loneliness and repressed sexuality to the edge of the ridiculous.
But "A Short Film About Love," which has rich, subtly shaded performances by Mr. Lubaszenko and Miss Szapolowska, has a bleak eloquence. Its picture of a world where people spy on one another reverberates with a post-cold-war paranoia, evoking the chilling notion that privacy, like love, may also be just an illusion.
Technical Information:
Title: Krótki film o miłości/ A Short Film About Love
Year: 1988
Country: Poland
Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski
Source: Retail DVD9
DVD Format: NTSC DVD9
Container: .ISO+MDS
Size: 5.10 GB
Length: 1:22:55
Programs used: Unknown
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Video: MPEG2 @ ~6800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio: Polish Dolby Digital AC3, 48000HZ @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None
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