A Short Film About Love

I have watched this movie 10 years ago when I was feeling that love was an impossible happiness to achieve and it always accompanied disappointments.

Now that I am a happy man and I am not so pessimistic about love and life. However, this movie still fills my soul with wonder: How can love, disappointments and life be described so beautiful, like a poem, stylish and touching...

I will remember it as long as I believe in love.

A gripping and intriguing story about loving someone from afar. This is one of those films that I randomly pick up from whatever thread I come across, and now, having seen it, I am really surprised that it's mostly unknown. From the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski---I know, good luck on pronouncing his name, this is the extended version of the sixth episode of The Decalogue. Tomek is nineteen years old, a single guy who works in a post office. Every night, he spies on Magda, a middle-aged woman who lives in the building across. He falls in love with her and decides to profess his love one day after seeing her cry the previous night. At first, Magda doesn't take him seriously and she eventually hurts him. What follows after is both tragic and moving. This film is really spell-binding, from the powerful human emotions it displays to its sincere silent moments. It is a true gem of cinema, a special story waiting to be told. The characters are very real and the emotions they convey very honest. The obsession and the desperation felt by the protagonists are simply too painful to watch. This film is not readily available to some but it is worth every second of searching.

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A short film about love is truly the work of a master,although it was released as part of The Dekalog (all excellent) it stands out above the rest for it's detailed characterization.the film is so well cast,you almost forget your watching a film with actors,but feel your witnessing a human tragedy unfold before you eyes,the performances are so convincing and the setting so real its like watching a documentary on the human condition,and the message is a clear one,not all love has an happy ending,indeed there is a very painful side to feeling love and never as the cinema explored it so poignantly as Krzysztof Kieslowski

I invite viewers of this film to compare it with the short version (Dekalog 6) and the script. All three differ from one another. They have different endings and lead to different interpretations.

In this film, the feature length version, Kieslowski portrays human love poetically, authentically, and powerfully. I consider Tomek as a lover by the form of incarnation. He takes into different forms (post worker, milkman, voyeur) in order to show his love towards Magda. It is important to notice that Tomek sheds his blood when Magda has sex with others. There is a scene in which Magda spills a bottle of milk and cries. Tomek sees her from his telescope. Only he is present for Magda. Overall, Tomek's love is both sacrificial and redemptive.

After Tomek's hospitalization, Magda dresses more conservatively. She does not engage in sexual affairs with any man. In this sense, Tomek's love redeems the lustful Magda. The commandment (Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery) functions in the background. We normally perceive a voyeur as being adulterous. But in Tomek's situation, he peeps into Magda not as an adulterous voyeur. He loves Magda by peeping her as an incarnate. He expresses sacrificial, and redemptive love in a humane and authentic manner.

Unlike the other masterpiece in his Decalogue, Killing, in 'A Short Film About Love' Kieslowski treats the subject of love with an extraordinarily delicate, rather than a polemic, eye. As ever he manages to express more with subtlety than most directors ever will with expression: it is rather what is not said, what is not expressed, that leaves an indelible mark upon us.

Olaf Lubaszenko's central performance as the boy is, rather than 'opaque' as it has been termed, engrossing from the start. His innocence and fragility, just like the film's, are an invitation to the intimacy we progressively acquire. We, the film's audience, watch engrossed and exposed just as does he, and, in another sense, does the subject of his observations. His telescope becomes a direct motif; distance, separation, enlargement: all the things the filmmaker provides for the viewer. Thus, at emotional, intellectual and metacinematic levels the film explores its themes: observation and love.

While it may not come to solid conclusions (nor ought it to), the sensitivity with which the director watches his actors is utterly compelling. The resultant negotiation between man and women, subject and observer, viewer and filmmaker is a relationship, a love affair. Perhaps Barthes might have sought to go further, waiting for the end of the film, its 'death', to find psychological and sexual consummation to such an affair, and the film may support such a reading. Even a far less academic approach is sufficient, however, in order to enjoy the work at it appears at face value. We do not need to analyse in order to feel, and it is the film's emotional impact that remains when our brief voyeurism, our visit to the cinema, ends.