Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Is it obsession or love?, 30 Aug 2007
The only criticism I would have of this enthralling Polish language film by the great Polish-French director Krzysztof Kieslowski is his use of the "opened window" conceit. Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska) is a woman who lives alone in a high rise housing development. She is sexy and cynical to the point of not believing in love. To her it is all desire, and the fulfillment or frustration of desire. Across the way from her lives a virginal young man by the name of Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko) who has been spying on her from his apartment window through a telescope.
He lives with a friend's mother (Stefania Iwinska) who looks after him as her own son. He works in the post office and obsesses about Magda's life. He watches her with her beaux. He even goes so far as to write a couple of phony money order slips for her and put them in her mailbox just so she will have to go to his window and ask about them. When she does he is able to examine her features closely. Is his an obsession or is it love? Kieslowski's answer is that it is love, love with the kind of depth and feeling that Magda cannot even imagine until she experiences it. And then she is amazed and dumbfounded.
The key scene in the movie occurs when Tomek is finally able to be together with the object of his love, in her apartment, with her telling him that "When a woman wants a man she gets wet inside." And she invites him to check it out, so to speak. But what happens does not lead to any kind of fulfillment. Instead Tomek is inadvertently humiliated.
And that's the story, more or less. As usual with Kieslowski, human feelings predominate and are stark and one might say conflicted--the conflict arising between humankind's baser instincts and the more civilized ones of society. What he does here is turn the stalker into the saint, in a sense, and the object of his love into something unworthy of that love.
The question might arise: is it realistic to believe that a woman would leave her windows open and her lights on for all to see inside while she goes about her private life? No, it isn't. But we have to accept this device. After that the film is fully realistic to the point of even being mundane in its depiction of middle class city life. The characters are ordinary and even a little boring except for Tomek's supreme obsession. It is this "jewel" in the heart of the Polish city that lifts his life and her life above the ordinary. Even though we know that she is too old and too world-weary for him and that he is too hopelessly young and inexperienced for her for lasting love to ever bloom between them, we cannot help but think how wonderful it would be if we could all feel as he does, or be the object of such love.
Usually when this theme is worked out it is the obsessed who suffer greatly, it is the obsessed who are to be pitied--and we do to some extent feel something close to that for Tomek. But here it is Magda who we end up pitying the more because of her inability to love. Compared to Tomek she is a deprived creature who will never find true happiness--unless she learns this lesson she has gotten from this young man whose passion for her was unlike anything she had ever experienced before.
And this is Kieslowski's point: it is not only better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. It is only through love that we can truly identify with another human being. We see this in the scene where Madga is looking through Tomek's telescope into her apartment window and recalling what he had seen one day, the day that she had come home and spilled the milk and sat at the table crying over that spilled milk (very typical of Kieslowski to use such an obvious, but telling and entirely apt cliche) after a breakup with one of her boyfriends. In memory she sees Tomek looking at her crying and running her finger through the spilled milk, and she realizes the depth of his commiseration with her and his love for her, and in her mind's eye she sees him beside her (as he truly was psychologically) with his hand on her shoulder and love in his heart.
We might think that at some other time she will look back on a relationship she had had in her life and realize that the failure was due to a lack of love on her part. Indeed she more or less reveals that to us when she tells Tomek's "Godmother" that no, she is not the right person for Tomek. We know that she is too cynical and would only use him temporarily for gratification, and that would be all.
But I was left with the sense that Magda would indeed learn from her experience and would be transformed. There is this sense of hope and the possibility of emotional and spiritual growth that is often seen in the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski.
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21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The second film from the Dekalog: Krotki Film O Milosci, 19 Mar 2003
In the early 1990s I came across Krzytof Kieslowski's Dekalog on BBC2- ten hour long films based around the principles of the Ten Commandments. Kieslowski and co-writer Krytztof Piesiewicz advanced on their initial collaboration on 1984's No End (Bez Konca). Here they would explore the philosophy of the Ten Commandments as applied to contemporary world, each film having different cinematographers to create an original feeling. These ten films are available over two sets, and remain some of the most potent films I've ever had the pleasure to see & that I think would appeal to anyone.Kieslowski got the chance to turn two of these short-films into features, thus Dekalog 5 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' became 'A Short Film About Killing'- redolent of Camus & Dostoyevksy & actually halting state execution for several years in Poland (films like Monster's Ball & Dead Man Walking are vacuous compared) & this film: A Short Film about Love. Dekalog 6/A Short Film about Love was the first Kieslowski work I watched- reminiscent of Hitchcock's Rear Window & elements of Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) it is set in the same desolate housing block found in all the Dekalog films. The central character Tomek is a post office worker who lives with an elderly landlady in a housing block opposite that of Magda: an older woman who he has become obssessed with. This is a similar territory to Scorsese's Taxi Driver & the Norweigian film Junk Mail (1998). He begins to manipulate situations (lost post, taking up a position as a milkman, phoning the gas company when a lover visits her etc), while spying on her from a telescope. Finally he descends into a voyeuristic game that sees his perfect love turned into facile sexual infatuation & he attempts suicide... This is where the film advances on Dekalog 6, Tomek forever changed following his failed bid for suicide & Magda becoming obssessed with him. The end reminds me of the scene at the end of Taxi Driver, where Travis Bickle leaves Betsy on the sidewalk, seeing her in the mirror he looks away... A Short Film about Love is a great film, proof that you don't need a vast budget to make a timeless piece of cinema. The performances are excellent- No End's Grazyna Szapolowska is wonderful as Magda, possessing a wild sexuality with a hint of despair. Co-star Olaf Lubaszenko is equally great as Tomek- whose claustrophobic relationship with his elderly landlady reminds me of the one at the centre of Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher (2001). A great film that would pave the way for the amazing Double Life of Veronique (1991), the timeless Three Colours Trilogy (93/94) & the posthumous script Heaven (2002)- filmed by Tom Tywker of Run Lola Run fame. Kieslowski remains one of the all time great directors, alongside those such as Hal Ashby, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Bresson etc...
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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Multi-faceted love, 17 Jul 2003
By A Customer
As he did with Dekalog 5 (which was extended to A Short Film About Killing) Kieslowski extended the sixth episode of his influential Polish TV series into this intriguing study of voyeurism and repressed emotions. Featuring genuinely touching central performances, the film may not be as instantly powerful as its aforementioned companion piece, but its charm lies in its elusive nature and its story of a young man who falls in love with a woman who lives in the block of flats next to his and whose life he observes through the telescope in his room...
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