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Oh, I looooooove Kieslowski.
Runce is right: it's all about attention, about putting yourself in the right frame of mind and lketting the film explain itself to you, to lay out its own rules for understanding it.
White is perhaps his most accesible film—it's almost a caper movie, ennit? albeit imbued with that dour Eastern European sensibility.
Blue was devastating, on so many levels—its theme, liberty, taking the form of Camus' axiom: "the terrible burden of knowing all men are free." The build-up of Red was intriguing, but I felt a tad let down by the deus ex machina ending: I mean, I know what he was trying to do, and that the contrived nature of it was part of the point, but I didn't feel it in my guts.
Double Life, for me, is one of the sexiest movies ever made. Nuff said.
Much of The Decalogue falls into soap opera territory, IMHO. There are some harrowing moments—though oddly enough I thought "A Short Film About Killing" (episode 5) was actually one of the weaker spots. It did a fine job of bringing us inside the mind of the killer as he slips deeper into psychosis, but I thought its politics were bit too obvious. "A Short Film About Love," (episode 6) however, is a stone fucking classic—the way the struggle of love and attraction shifts back and forth between a teenage voyeur and his promiscuous neighbor.
The Decalogue films are only an hour each, so they're an economical investment of your time.
Kieslowski was one of those filmmakers whose stuff just unfolded in a time of its own—like Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, or Andrei Tarkovsky. It's a Euro thang: it's the antithesis of Hollywood's "give 'em what they want and beat 'em over the head with it" approach. It's more like I'm going to tell you a story, but I'll be telling it in a language you do not speak: but with proper attention, you can learn the language even as I tell you my story. |
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