ReaderKenka
Let's be realistic.
Invaderbank
The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.
Lela
The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.
ackstasis
Episode 6 of 'Dekalog' is very strongly indebted to Hitchcock's 'Rear Window (1954).' For the past year, young Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko) has been spying on the life of his older neighbour, the promiscuous Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska). When he finally finds the courage to approach Magda in the flesh, she is amused by his awkward advances, and decides to toy with his adolescent emotions. Her rejection ultimately leads Tomek to attempt suicide, in a heartbreaking scene that forces the viewer to wait an eternity before the bathwater begins to stain red.In Hitchcock's film, the viewer was basically confined to James Stewart's cramped apartment. Kieslowski, on the other hand, adroitly shifts the viewer's perspective as the story matures. In the opening scene, the focus is on Magda, whom we presume is the main character, and I mentally brushed aside the post-office clerk as an insignificant bit- part. Instead, the film follows Tomek, and our glimpses of Magda are for a long time restricted to distant glimpses across an apartment courtyard, silent but titillating in their voyeurism. By the end of the film, the roles have been entirely reversed; Magda begins to obsessively scan Tomek's bedroom with her binoculars.Kieslowski had previously released this episode in a feature-length version under the title 'A Short Film About Love (1988).' I haven't seen this film – nor, indeed, have I seen any of the director's work outside the mini-series – but I'd love to see how he expands upon the relationship between Tomek and Magda. This particular episode falls under the commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery," though perhaps something about coveting thy neighbour's wife would've been more appropriate. I'm not particularly phased, though; Kieslowki is constantly blurring the lines between the commandments.
Aquilant
This story is based on the EYE'S FICTITIOUS POWER, meant as a subtle and perverse kind of interference with our personal lives in the name of aims in clear contrast with every rules for civil living. Intended as a strict and precarious consequence of the obvious impossibility of coming to terms with one's own frustrated ambition, subjected to under-valuate the human interrelations dynamics. Acting as a comforting heaven-sent shelter from the dangers of the main character's hermetically sealed world, as an ambiguous way to take up a defensive position and give vent to the increased capability of the faculty of sight artfully increased at other people's expenses, whose privacy is being violated in their own homes.The Dekalog 6, "Thou shalt not commit adultery", a shorter version of "A Short Film About Love", rotates around the barycenter of Tomek's room, a world apart from where he looks around epistemologically in search of some contiguous reality analyzed under his anomalous point of view, purified of all normal human contacts, always focused on Magda, his "bright" object of desire, incapable of facing her with open heart for fear of tasting the bitter flavor of frustration. Conscious of his aleatory capacity of interacting with reality by phone, Tomek may be considered a living symbol of the human inability to perform the least act of love. His disturbing condition of abusive collector of undue slices of reality is doomed to reveal all its limits owing to wrong synergism between his will power immersed in totalizing choices and the frailty of his immature mind deprived of any sense of security given up for lost. So his "bright" object of desire assumes the same solidity of an image reflected in the glass, completely devoid of all real consistence, even if endowed with a paralyzing erotic charge able to melt virtual juvenile ardors like snow in the sun.Kieslowski shows here an unusual tendency toward reddish tones of the same color of that insane passion which drives Tomek to the perpetration of sexual impure acts forbidden by the sixth commandment, together with Magda, charming thirty-year-old woman affected by exhibitionist mania and late repentance for her sins, opaque and unlikely reminiscence of the evangelic Mary Magdalene. The red color assumes the natural function of dramatic passion, dominating the scene completely such as in the final chapter of the colors trilogy. But while in "Trois couleurs: Rouge" its presence is mixed with a sense of detachment and with skeptical attitude towards every passionate involvements, in "Dekalog 6" one can perceive from afar the heat of the blazing flame ready to burn out suddenly as soon as the real nature of love, fleeting and deceptive, can be unmasked.
chris miller
the best of the series that i've seen so far. i guess you could call this one a sort of cinema verite style. the meat of this film is in the story and the characters. so much of the story is told without dialogue and that's sexy. the acting is very good as i've quickly come to expect from kieslowski's crew and the story was just plain good. the changing of roles midway through provided and interesting situation while avoiding a contrived feeling. B+.
simuland
Cat-and-mouse game of voyeur and victim, with an exchange of roles between the two about halfway through. Seems to have been well-received by the critics, but I found it too coy and contrived, not to mention compromised by a lack of credibility: The supposedly naive pure idealistic love of the voyeur, a 19 year-old boy, fails to acknowledge the inherent ugliness of voyeurism. Voyeurism entails a sinister imbalance of power between watcher and watched; it consists of cruelty and exploitation more than love; all of which the woman seemed to overlook much too easily. If the boy truly loved her, he would have stopped stalking her; his isn't love, but disease. The whole affair is intellectual structuralism at its worst, a plot concocted to demonstrate a point. Apparently, the woman spied upon "adulterates" the boy's love by humiliating him, as well as being unfaithful to her lover and unfaithful to love itself by her cynicism (thus violating the commandment, though unmarried). Her repentance and reversal seems as sudden and arbitrary as everything else in the film. Silly color coding abounds; the stranger in white (angel of death?) here carries a suitcase and shopping bag. The only intriguing element for me was the surrogate mother's sexual possessiveness, a tickle of evil.
