ackstasis Episode 6 of 'Dekalog' is very strongly indebted to Hitchcock's 'Rear Window (1954).' For the past year, young Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko) has been spying on the life of his older neighbour, the promiscuous Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska). When he finally finds the courage to approach Magda in the flesh, she is amused by his awkward advances, and decides to toy with his adolescent emotions. Her rejection ultimately leads Tomek to attempt suicide, in a heartbreaking scene that forces the viewer to wait an eternity before the bathwater begins to stain red.In Hitchcock's film, the viewer was basically confined to James Stewart's cramped apartment. Kieslowski, on the other hand, adroitly shifts the viewer's perspective as the story matures. In the opening scene, the focus is on Magda, whom we presume is the main character, and I mentally brushed aside the post-office clerk as an insignificant bit- part. Instead, the film follows Tomek, and our glimpses of Magda are for a long time restricted to distant glimpses across an apartment courtyard, silent but titillating in their voyeurism. By the end of the film, the roles have been entirely reversed; Magda begins to obsessively scan Tomek's bedroom with her binoculars.Kieslowski had previously released this episode in a feature-length version under the title 'A Short Film About Love (1988).' I haven't seen this film – nor, indeed, have I seen any of the director's work outside the mini-series – but I'd love to see how he expands upon the relationship between Tomek and Magda. This particular episode falls under the commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery," though perhaps something about coveting thy neighbour's wife would've been more appropriate. I'm not particularly phased, though; Kieslowki is constantly blurring the lines between the commandments.

Polaris_DiB I think the film "A Short Film about Love" is a better descriptor than the commandment "Thou shalt not commit adultery" in this case because the "adultery" in this sense is much more symbolic than some of the other segments of the Decalogue. Most of the Decalogue is steeped in layers of symbolic and discursive intention, making this a moot point, but altogether I must say that this is one of the least well-developed and thematically linked segments within the Decalogue.A young schoolboy finds himself fascinated with a neighbor who is sexually prolific but longs to find someone she can truly connect to. The schoolboy translates his feelings to love (haven't we all at some point?) and pursues the neighbor, who finds herself genuinely interested in this purveyance but has become too cynical about love to accept his approach. When the two of them mesh, it results in uncomfortable emotional lack of responsibility that endangers the boy's frail (and in my opinion shallow) mind.Once again dealing with opposites, Kieslowski's structured relationship between the two is not only the focus but the most interesting aspect of this episode, mostly since the woman's current lover is banal and the boy's history is uninteresting. Still, something about the obsessive tendencies of love and the difficulty in interpreting feelings sticks well, and is one of the film's best themes.--PolarisDiB

Aquilant This story is based on the EYE'S FICTITIOUS POWER, meant as a subtle and perverse kind of interference with our personal lives in the name of aims in clear contrast with every rules for civil living. Intended as a strict and precarious consequence of the obvious impossibility of coming to terms with one's own frustrated ambition, subjected to under-valuate the human interrelations dynamics. Acting as a comforting heaven-sent shelter from the dangers of the main character's hermetically sealed world, as an ambiguous way to take up a defensive position and give vent to the increased capability of the faculty of sight artfully increased at other people's expenses, whose privacy is being violated in their own homes.The Dekalog 6, "Thou shalt not commit adultery", a shorter version of "A Short Film About Love", rotates around the barycenter of Tomek's room, a world apart from where he looks around epistemologically in search of some contiguous reality analyzed under his anomalous point of view, purified of all normal human contacts, always focused on Magda, his "bright" object of desire, incapable of facing her with open heart for fear of tasting the bitter flavor of frustration. Conscious of his aleatory capacity of interacting with reality by phone, Tomek may be considered a living symbol of the human inability to perform the least act of love. His disturbing condition of abusive collector of undue slices of reality is doomed to reveal all its limits owing to wrong synergism between his will power immersed in totalizing choices and the frailty of his immature mind deprived of any sense of security given up for lost. So his "bright" object of desire assumes the same solidity of an image reflected in the glass, completely devoid of all real consistence, even if endowed with a paralyzing erotic charge able to melt virtual juvenile ardors like snow in the sun.Kieslowski shows here an unusual tendency toward reddish tones of the same color of that insane passion which drives Tomek to the perpetration of sexual impure acts forbidden by the sixth commandment, together with Magda, charming thirty-year-old woman affected by exhibitionist mania and late repentance for her sins, opaque and unlikely reminiscence of the evangelic Mary Magdalene. The red color assumes the natural function of dramatic passion, dominating the scene completely such as in the final chapter of the colors trilogy. But while in "Trois couleurs: Rouge" its presence is mixed with a sense of detachment and with skeptical attitude towards every passionate involvements, in "Dekalog 6" one can perceive from afar the heat of the blazing flame ready to burn out suddenly as soon as the real nature of love, fleeting and deceptive, can be unmasked.

Look Closer Once again Kieslowski manages to produce a compelling and thought provoking film. This time seemingly constructing his plot from the best parts of "Rear Window" and "Lolita". Kieslowski presents his characters simply as they are, free of prologues, backgrounds, flashbacks or exposition and does not "ask" us to identify with the obsessive voyeur or the subject of his gaze but "presents" them to us as subjects to observe. Inevitably Kieslowski's choices pay off as we begin to empathize with these characters not necessarily because he wants us to but because they're needs and desires are too similar to ours for us to simply look at them in disgust. Episode 6 presents us with two characters who begin on opposite sides of the emotional spectrum and end up reversed just as their voyeuristic tendencies do. There is never any chastising from one character to another which some have called unrealistic or contrived. For me however this rings truer than the most moralizing of speeches because both characters know they're in no position to judge the other. They're both aware of their faults and willingly pay for them (witness Magda's indifference to her own suffering and Tomek's voluntary repentance courtesy of Magda's lover (ala "Raging Bull"). To those who would call such a tale unrealistic I say go watch "Pretty Woman" again.