A Short Film About Love (1988)

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

My most cherished type of film shows our idea of reality to be just that, an idea born from our own urges and various storytellings, which cloud the soul and need to be challenged, dismantled, removed from the eyes so that we can see life as it is. Failing that, which is a rare type, I'm more than content to encounter a film that feels its way truly in a world where those urges and storytellings lie in wait.It's why I'm seeking out Kieslowski these days and already he seems like one who has the talent to feel his way into the world of emotion.But this is broken in a key way. He doesn't feel his way in here, he forces it. For a film that is lauded as a vital depiction of love, what I saw simply isn't love. It might be fantasy, desire, or obsession (Rear Window is quoted), but it's not love and for it to be reciprocated as love, it moves into a world that I don't recognize as true. If you have the chance to watch it with a woman, please do so.However evocative his sense of place is, with two apartment blocks on opposite sides and the night in the middle a space where two viewers wonder about yearning, however lyrical he is about the yearning for contact over this divide, from that point on I simply have no ground to walk between them. Which is a shame because all of this should be something I like. It is when Kar Wai does it.And in the end he pulls off something so magical, his emotional color so deep it spills out from the container of the film. He portrays a love so deep that I'm almost embarrassed that I have this container to receive it in, it's worth so much more to my mind. This is where she visits him after he has come out of the hospital, he's lying unconscious in bed, and she watches through his binoculars into how he saw her (at her most vulnerable), seeing herself through his eyes in a way that lets her know how deep his love was, seeing herself all at once through this love for her. Sublime.It's mystifying to me that someone can know women so poorly and so deeply in the course of an hour, that would be my question if I ever had the chance to meet Kieslowski. Something tells me that this is the color he would go on to use in his celebrated trilogy and makes me anticipate them even more. But first, I have to mount the Dekalog.

Krzysztof Kieslowski is a Polish director most known for directing the three colors trilogy. His 1988 movie 'A Short Film About Love' aka 'Krótki film o milosci' is, as its name implicates, a short (with a duration of c. 80 minutes) film about love. With a catchy title like that, one may expect A Short Film About Love to be a predictable romantic comedy. Well, A Short Film About Love is as far from comedy as possible - in fact it is somewhat depressing. I'm also not sure if I would label this movie as 'romantic'. I'll let you decide that.The movie is about Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko), a 19 year old who works at the post office. He is obsessed with his older neighbor Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska) who lives in the tower block opposite. He regularly spies on her through a telescope he stole, he even calls her on the telephone and tries to contact her in any way possible. One day he decides to confess his actions to her. As you can see, the plot itself is very simple and thin. However, it is really effective and works amazingly good. This unusual combination of Hitchcockian vibes and 'romance' really appealed to me.As you may have guessed from the movie's plot, A Short Film About Love is a rather slow movie, there isn't much drama to it. The movie benefits mostly from the haunting and gloomy surroundings in which the characters interact. Furthermore, the performances in the movie are absolutely great and very powerful. Olaf Lubaszenko is excellent in his minimalist portrayal of the love-stricken, creepy Tomek, and Grazyna Szapolowska's portrayal of the promiscuous artist Magda is also note worthy. Besides these two, there aren't many other prominent characters in the movie. Of course, there's the old lady in whose house Tomek lives (played by Stefania Iwinska) but she isn't that important for the overall story. Olaf Lubaszenko and Grazyna Szapolowska are the ones that keep the movie going.A Short Film About Love really keeps pushing the boundaries of fictional love. It asks questions such as - What is truly love? Does it even exist? What does it take to be in love? How do we know we're in love? It analyzes how one person's actions affect another one's life and how to deal with the consequences of your actions. A Short Film About Love is a dark and bold journey into the human psyche and into the complicated emotion that is love. A definitive recommendation!Rating: 8/10 Read more at http://passpopcorn.wordpress.com/

i watched it last night and it completely blew me away. what a brilliant, wonderful, heart touching,.... ( running out of adjectives ) film. while watching it a rarest thing happened to me, tears filled my eyes. last time i remember tears rolling down, it was while watching "to kill a mockingbird". it's actually a good thing that it is one of cinema's best kept secrets because there are people who don't have the heart to appreciate it. i am 19 and a straight guy and i can say for sure there are morons who would call it the crappiest, lousiest film ever. so at least it has been saved from those god forsaken creatures. anyway i just love this movie. my ratings 10/10

A Polish art-house director Krzysztof Kieslowski is most well known for his international films, La double vie de Véronique (1991) and the Three Colours trilogy: White, Blue and Red. Kieslowski graduated from Łódz's film school in Poland, from which many directors have started their journey, for instance Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi. Krzysztof started by directing documentaries, as many do. From documentaries he moved to television films and then to fiction features. Kieslowski is very well known from his TV-series "Dekalog" (1989), which still is seen as one of the highest achievement of European television. Dekalog is a ten episode long series about The Ten Commandments, each episode deals with one commandment. Some might find it odd that an atheist made a TV-series about The Ten Commandments, but Kieslowski doesn't approach the subject religiously as he does ethically. Because the Bible and The Ten Commandments have had a huge impact on our conception of what is right and what is wrong. As an entirety the series builds a picture of a modern man facing moral problems.This brief introduction leads us to Kieslowski's film A Short Film About Love (Krótki film o milosci). From two episodes of Dekalog Kieslowski decided to make full length films, episode five: Thou shalt not kill (A Short Film About Killing) and episode six: Thou shalt not commit adultery (A Short Film About Love). Both, the episode and the film, are very interesting. And the perspectives the viewer takes change. When watching the episode one tries to find a bond with the commandment - Thou shalt not commit adultery. But when watching the film one might simply look it as a survey of love in the world we live in.As in all episodes of Dekalog, so does A Short Film About Love take place in Polish suburb near Warsaw. Kieslowski tries to build his own world view in this soulless place full of loneliness and selfishness. Kieslowski says in his interview book, Kieslowski on Kieslowski that the most interesting thing in this film is perspective; the film is divided into three parts. First we see a boy, 19-year-old Tomek who is stalking a woman. We don't know anything about this woman, we only see what Tomek sees. He is disturbing the woman, trying to see her and ruin her relationships. Suddenly we see them together for a little while, the woman upsets Tomek and Tomek cuts his wrists. Now the third part starts, we see everything from the perspective of the woman. She starts to feel pity, yearning, compassion and love towards Tomek. But the camera never goes to the hospital with Tomek, we only see what the woman sees. And in the end the woman looks into the telescope - into herself.When watching A Short Film About Love as a film about the commandment Thou shalt not commit adultery, I interpreted it like this. In the film we see a lot of glass, windows, the glass could be the motive of the film. In the beginning Tomek breaks the window to get inside the warehouse. He also stalks the woman behind his window, and sees her behind her window. Also there is a glass shaped like a circle next to the woman's window. To me the glass, the window symbolizes the illusion. Magda (the woman) breaks Tomek's illusion of love, by showing that there is no love, that there is only sex. Then Tomek breaks Magda's idea of love, he breaks her hard shell. When I watched the episode I thought this was the "Adultery" they committed. They broke the illusion. Thou shalt not commit adultery.But before I had seen Dekalog, I had seen the film, so then I didn't think about the commandment, all I thought was the major subject the relation between love and loneliness. One sees love as a pure, beautiful thing, but isn't sure how to show it and the other sees love simply as sex, she doesn't think that love even exists. The viewer obviously sees that Tomek isn't alright, he is sick. He is in love. In our selfish, cold and cynical world love can't be anything else except a sickness. A small detail about this is when the godmother is watching Poland's beauty queen contest - is this love in our society?Krzysztof Kieslowski's series Dekalog and all his later films are born from the hands of this amazing trio: Kieslowski himself as a writer/director, Krzysztof Piesiewicz as the screenwriter and Zbigniew Preisner as the film score composer. I think Preisner was very important to Kieslowski. His music added a new level of beauty to his films, all of us who have seen The Double Life of Veronique, know what I mean. Preisner's music is honest, true and beautiful just as Kieslowski's films. Another important man in Kieslowski's production was the cinematographer, Sławomir Idziak who worked with him in Veronique, Blue and Dekalog: episode 5 (Thou shalt not kill). So Kieslowski's film A Short Film About Love isn't just a new version of Hitchcock's Rear Window, it is a picture of a lonely man, it's a moral study about our conception of love and also a very beautiful story.