A Short Film About Love [Poland 1988]

Krótki film o miłości
Director: K. Kieślowski
Cinematographer: W. Adamek

One of Kieślowski's last films under socialism, this continues his slide out of the social and into the aesthetic and abstractly psychological. While it is not as strong a film as his earlier ones in my opinion, it is strong as a study of love, abstracted away from all of the things that usually come along with love, like need, jealousy, etc. It is moreover much stronger than Kieślowski's later attempts at distilling out psychological categories as in the 'Three Colours' trilogy, particularly 'Three Colours: Blue'.

The kind of love depicted here is in fact pure love of one human being by another. Paradoxically, it is the person who has never been loved or known love in the ordinary sense who is the most acquainted with what love actually is. It is the person who has had all of the 'love' she can get who has no idea what love is, does not believe in it and is afraid of it. Out of fear she destroys him, only to finally realise through him the aspect of her humanity she has been seeking. For all of these reasons there is something powerful about this movie, and this is intensified by Kieślowski's use of ordinary but (as usual) complex characters as a channel for this larger study.

There is an interesting parallel with the Czechoslovakian film Closely Observed Trains; in both films, a young man who is a virgin prematurely ejaculates on his first time with a woman, and as a result slits his wrists, but is discovered. Of course, that film was far more surreal and humorous, and the act was presented as slightly more absurd, but it was solemn in both. It is an event loaded with symbolism--disappointed expectations, brimming over with self-destructing emotion, the coming-to-be of one's worst fears, etc. But in this particular film it takes on a different form, because the protagonist clearly does not want this course of events in the first place; rather, he does not understand the expectations being placed on him. He wants nothing--only to love--and feels he has failed when called upon by that love to do something he does not comprehend.

The scenario of the peeping Tom provides an opportunity for some unique cinematography. A great deal of the filming is done with narrowly framed shots through windows, without sound except the breathing of the watching boy, and therefore the story is told entirely through body movements, complemented by selective use of coloured glass, painted backgrounds, depth through furniture, and symbolic objects. Because we are present both in the room of the protagonist and the room we are watching, this does not give the feeling of an artificially silent shot, so it is unintrusive while preserving these features. This is undoubtedly the most cinematographically interesting aspect of this film.

We are given very few bits of information about the world around the characters, because of course this is a film not about a society, a place or a time, but rather about some kind of universal human characteristics. But the Poland we do get a few glimpses of is falling apart at the end of socialism--the milk man no longer delivers milk because he can't be bothered; the postal service is referred to as 'a bloody mess'.

One almost gets the feeling that Kieślowski was tired of dealing with society, and since things were beginning to change so rapidly anyway, he decided it would be more interesting to focus on the more general, basic, or abstract. Unfortunately this trajectory took him into the realm of what feels like the human still life. In this film, he does an excellent job of that--it is only later, e.g. with 'Three Colours: Blue', that he seems to have gone up a blind alley.