A Short Film About Love

A Short Film About Love (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1987)

An innocent virgin spies on his frontal neighbor and falls in love with her, thus starts using tricks on her which he hopes will lead to them meeting.

With his Dekalog, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski attempted to make an hour film with each of the ten commandments. Which he did but with mitigated success. Then, two of the most successful hours were edited into full length movies. A Short Film About Killing which is reviewed here and A Short Film About Love is the film that will be reviewed in this post.

As much as the bleak and cold atmosphere of the aforementioned film about killing was convincing and gut moving, the intimist approach of A Short Film About Love is a bit nauseating on the aspects of the obsession of an absent love affair. The lovers are actually all emotionally in bad shape and not prepared to be facing those giant elements. It is, in fact, a bit difficult to get to identify with a character and we kind of have pity of all of them more than really want them to be happy or in love. Those are people who need help more than anything else.

With every film I discover from Kieslowski’s œuvre I kind of slowly loose interest in his mise en scène and directing. There’s been a huge fandom following his Three Colors trilogy and his legacy of foreign film director is almost untouchable but I kind of don’t see the admiration and the praise that he’s got. He is a realistic and subtle director that knows how to tell a story but with such an emphasis on visuals that his story seems a bit drafty.

Soon I will be attacking the whole Dekalog as an ensemble of short films that I will be reviewing in a series and the same thing will be done sometime with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. As much as I can say for Krzysztof Kieslowski’s films, my appreciation has been on a long downhill and I hope that the ten hours of his Dekalog will be like a chairlift for my interest in his films.