In a clear nod to Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), the plot concerns a shy young man, Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko), who has become obsessed with Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska), a woman living in the apartment building opposite his window. Every evening he interrupts his studies to observe her movements with a stolen telescope. An employee at the local post office, Tomek even places false pickup notices in her mailbox in order to bring her to his workplace and get a closer view. His motives for peeping, however, are not purely sexual as one would expect: witnessing from afar her loneliness and unsatisfying relationships with men, Tomek grows to care genuinely about her as an individual. However, when Tomek reveals his obsession to her, she initiates a game of revenge that turns against her as much as it does Tomek.
In reworking the material from the original hour-long episode of The Decalogue into a feature film, Kieslowski does not simply expand scenes and fill in added plot details; the two films have a subtle, but significantly different emphasis. The original television episode, which is mainly an ironic tale of comeuppance, displays a brutal terseness that reaches its logical culmination in the abrupt, devastating ending. The feature-length version has a more open, warmer feel. At the lead actress Grazyna Szapolowska's insistence, Kieslowski shot a new ending for the longer version which allows Magda a kind of redemption, insofar as she loses her hard shell of cynicism and learns to see things (literally) from another person's point of view. This version also greatly fleshes out the relationship between Tomek and the older woman (Stefania Iwinska) from whom he rents out a room. As a result, the longer version's treatment of human relationships is far more nuanced. On a deeper level, it becomes a systematic examination of the nature of love in a way that the shorter film is not to the same extent.
While on paper the premise of a woman falling in love with a man who is, in essence, stalking her seems patently incredible, here it works due to the chemistry between the two leads. Kieslowski was perhaps the only director who could pull this off, thanks to his eye for the ironies and nuances of human behavior. The radiantly beautiful Grazyna Szapolowska perfectly embodies Magda's simultaneous hardness and vulnerability. Olaf Lubaszenko manages to project both an almost pathological shyness (helping explain his withdrawal into voyerism) and an innocence, even idealism, that make him an immediately sympathetic figure. Their onscreen interactions are painfully believable. Kieslowski's direction cannot be praised highly enough; on the surface the visual style of the film seems relatively plain, but each image and gesture, no matter how fleeting, carries maximum expressive weight, opening up a world of unspoken feelings that most filmmakers never remotely approach. Kieslowski and cinematographer Witold Adamek's masterly use of the telephoto lens - not only to mimic the point of view of a telescope but also to give precise emphasis to details within shots - deserves special praise.
Kino on Video, the distributor for the DVD, has licensed the materials from the French-based distributor MK2. Since the transfer was originated in the PAL standard and converted to NTSC for the U.S. release, there is minor PAL-NTSC ghosting in the image. There is also a certain amount of digital artifacting in dark scenes (perhaps exacerbated by the PAL-NTSC transfer), but it doesn't seriously detract from one's enjoyment of the film. Certainly, the transfer has vastly better color and definition than that on the DVD set of The Decalogue; those already familiar with that version will be pleased with how good the film looks here.
Special features on the DVD include: Tramway (1966), a five-minute, silent student film about a young man flirting with a girl he has met on a trolley car at night; theatrical trailers for other upcoming Kieslowski films in the MK2/Kino series including A Short Film About Love, Blind Chance, No End and Camera Buff; interviews with actress Grazyna Szapolowska and assistant director Emmanuel Finkiel (who worked with Kieslowski on the Three Colors trilogy; and a concise and sharp-minded analysis of the film by Annette Insdorf, a scholar who served as Kieslowski's translator in France and has written a book on him entitled Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzystof Kieslowski. A Short Film About Love is the kind of film you find yourself wanting to revisit often, making this an essential purchase for anyone interested in contemporary cinema.
For more information about A Short Film About Love, visit Kino International. To order A Short Film About Love, go to TCM Shopping.
by James Steffen
