Saturday, January 5, 2013

Dekalog overall, and Dekalog 10: the fallibility of the human spirit


 
                     
DEKALOG has been a fascinating viewing experience. Like the ten incredibly rich instalments in James Joyce’s literary Dubliners, Dekalog features varied and authentic experiences about the fallibility of the human spirit. This is what it comes down to for me, perhaps a little like what Bergman tried to achieve in his myriad films set on Faro, and what Micheal Haneke seems to be trying to do with his films about madness and cruelty and the sinister depths of the human mind.

The fallibility of the human spirit is such a fascinating subject. In this collection alone, in order, we have:

1.       The university professor who mistakenly decides the ice in the stream should still be hard enough to skate on, but is mistaken, and his son drowns.

2.       The woman whose husband might be dying, and who can’t decide whether or not to abort the child of the man she is having an adulterous relationship with

3.       The woman who is desperately lonely and tries to tear her ex-lover away from his new family as she is alone on Christmas Eve

4.       The woman who can’t help wondering if the lovely man she thinks is her father really is her father, and if her relationship needs to change as a result

5.       The young male drifter who randomly kills a taxi driver and must face the awful consequences

6.       The young male voyeur, fascinated by the woman living in the apartment across the way, who is equally lonely and vulnerable and desperate to be loved

7.       The insecure mother and daughter who are unwittingly damaging a little girl in their pursuit of her love

8.       The older female professor who is forced to come to terms with her own regrettable actions during war-time conflict in Warsaw.

9.       The surgeon who is unable to offer sex to his wife and kids himself when he encourages her to take a lover

10.   The brothers who become rich overnight due to a family inheritance but can’ seem to cope with their new found fortune.
                                 

The fallibility that exists in all human beings provides us with an opportunity to forgive wrongdoing and see things from a wide rather than narrow perspective. A recent Australian scandal involved the pranking of a London hospital, which may have contributed to the suicide of the nurse involved in the call. The pranksters were demonised by certain sections of society. As were the culprits of the terrible murder of James Bulger, and the murderer who took the lives of the little children at a school in Connecticut recently. We have to try and understand all these perpetrators. This idea was perfectly put by Michael Leunig in a cartoon many years ago, wishing Bin Laden, still at large then, a Happy Christmas.
 

 
Following is a discussion about the final Dekalog film, a comedy about brothers.
 
Dekalog 10 is the warmest and lightest of the whole series. Jerzy and Artur are unlikely brothers who inherit a fortune from their estranged father after he dies. A sudden flourish of wealth can cause major headaches and complications- as this film testifies.
                
Artur is the charismatic, energetic brother who fronts a popular punk band called ‘City Death’ and looks and acts a little like an older Jim Morrison or Michael Hutchence. Jerzy is more conservative in his dress and lifestyle, and neither brother sees each other very much. It is the sudden acquisition of wealth, in the form of a fabulous stamp collection, that brings them together as brothers in arms.
Following the funeral the brothers inspect their late father’s flat and have a nightmarish time trying to get in. Their father indulged in tight security, and there are any number of alarms, bars and padlocks that need to be opened or broken.
The naïve brothers gain an inkling that the collection they discover in a safe might be worth something, so they attend a stamp exchange and discover the unexpected news.
           
The complications begin in earnest when Jerzy gifts his young son an expensive series of stamps based on a 1931 Zeppelin motif. These exact stamps are referenced in an earlier Dekalog when a professor of ethics has a conversation with a stamp enthusiast in Dekalog 8. Jerzy’s son has sold the valuable stamps to a swindler, who has sold them to a dealer in town. Jerzy visits the dealer, indignant about being swindled, but realising quickly there is little he can do.
Their next primary concern, as the hassles add up, is security. Artur is becoming paranoid about his father’s apartment, and soon a vicious looking black dog is enlisted. Then there is the matter of the missing stamp. They have the blue and yellow 1951 Mercury- and to have the rose as well would mean they are sitting on an absolute fortune. Gaining the elusive stamp was an obsession of their father’s. As a kind of homage to him, they try and find it. The other co-existing challenge is to re-coup the Zeppelin stamps dishonestly taken. Artur manages this in a clever, underhanded way, in detective-like fashion.
There is a strong undercurrent of comedy throughout this episode, mostly at the expense of the naïve brothers. The narrative takes an absurd twist when Jerzy agrees to donate a kidney in exchange for the elusive ‘Austrian rose Mercury.’ The decision to agree takes place during a discussion between the brothers in their father’s apartment. They talk about this elusive stamp as though it is the most prized possession on earth. Suddenly they are supreme stamp enthusiasts. Previously they didn’t show a skerrick of interest.
 
The inevitable occurs. As Jerzy is going under the knife, and as Artur is keeping vigil at the hospital, his face being caressed by a nurse groupie, they are being burgled by some professional stamp thieves. There are close-ups of the pristine stamps, gently held by tweezers, and magnified by glass, that are made to look absolutely beautiful, to one who does not appreciate the value of a stamp like he does the value of a book.
   
Jerzey leaves the hospital in a state of semi-euphoria, holding the precious rose stamp, not knowing its decreased value after the theft of all the other stamps. Artur informs him and cries into his shoulder. Meanwhile, the supposed vicious guard dog finds himself suddenly out of favour, and as the policeman arrives, Jerzy admits he had disconnected the burglar alarm. The comedy of errors have piled up. Money does strange things to not only friends, but also brothers. Both brothers hold secret meetings with the bemused policeman, each accusing the other of disloyalty.
The film has a highly amusing coda. Both brothers witness a meeting across the road of a mirror image of their once much loved dog, the swindler who swindled Jerzy’s young son and the stamp dealer who organised the kidney transplant. Back at the apartment they admit that each suspected the other, and display their new, cheap coincidentally identical purchases. At last they have a set: an image of world championship wrestling, an image of a seal, and a commemorative stamp based on police and security services. At least they are able to have a good laugh.
                    

Friday, January 4, 2013

Dekalog 9: when trust is broken


               

With Dekalog 9, at last a drama about a marriage, a husband and wife relationship, complicated by his impotence and her searching- “thou shalt no covet thy neighbour’s wife.”

Roman receives the bad news at the start of the film- “Classic results and symptoms”. He will no longer be able to have sex. In the foreground in the next shot, with his wife Hanka behind, is a black telephone. Just like the $40,000 cash is in the foreground in ‘Psycho’, with Marion in the background. The telephone is the chief way Hanka communicates with her lover. The news devastates Roman. He stands outside his home in the cold, pouring rain for punishment. Afterwards, inside, shots show Roman to be strong looking and virile. Hanka suspects, and is not in a hurry to hear the news. Once he tells her, she says, pragmatically, “love is in one’s heart, not between one’s legs.” However he knows she is young, and in a sort of Lady Chatterley-like situation.
                      

Like Hanka, Roman’s mind now begins to wander. There is a pretty medical student waiting for an operation where Roman works as a surgeon. It is not a relationship he pursues, but there appears to be a spark there. Meanwhile Hanka is acting on her desires, in the form of a fit young man who always wears a ski jacket. When she gets Roman to try on a conservative suit jacket that is ill fitting, the difference with her man in the ski jacket is obvious.

This man, Mariusz, isn’t very discreet, phoning their home when Roman is present, leaving a little booklet of his in the glovebox of the family car. Perhaps he is keen for the relationship to be exposed. Roman earlier encourages Hanka to have a lover. However this is not how he really feels about the situation. He is upset and anxious about it. He even takes to secretly listening in on calls from another room on a device he rigs up. Later he will hide in the house they secretly meet at, and watch in the dark shadows.

Roman works out that it is Hanka’s mother’s house that is the rendezvous point. He gets keys cut for the place and gives it a good search, finding a postcard from Mariusz to Hanka. Roman holds it up to the camera to see, as if it is piece of evidence to be used in a court of law.
              

The only time we see Hanka and her young lover make love, she is wearing her wedding ring, and looks as though she is in pain. It’s a shot of a woman who feels horribly guilty. Shortly she will get rid of him, her love for Roman still strong. The young lover emerges, whistling in his blue ski jacket, oblivious it seems to her dark feelings. Roman is voyeur, but a different kind of voyeur to the young man in an earlier Dekalog. We can’t help excuse him.  With all this subterfuge going on, both Hanka and Roman carry their bodies heavily when they walk. They seem like broken people.

At Hanka’s mother’s apartment, the view through the gap in the curtains is simultaneously Roman’s view and ours as well. Through his eyes we see her deal firmly in expelling her lover, in order to alleviate their shared pain.
                       

Hanka and Roman forge a new bond of trust when everything is exposed. In a melodramatic sequence near the end, changing the rhythm of the film entirely, Hanka goes on a skiing holiday and is followed by her ex-beau. Again she rejects him, but is terrified Roman may discover (which he has) that they are in the same skiing village. Desperately ringing home, Roman has already left what is probably a suicide note by the phone.
 

There is further communication between husband and wife, but in some ways it is now too late. Dekalog 9 is beautifully shot. The scenes in various locations, including the snow fields, take the viewer away from the claustrophobia of the crowded Warsaw tenement blocks. It is a strong story of love and tragedy, and regret, and is very real. Hanka’s final, touching ambiguous words to Roman are “God, you’re there.”
                                        
 

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Dekalog 8: the shadow of war-time Warsaw


               

Not surprisingly, in a large group of films set in Warsaw, there is a film, Dekalog 8, that is centred squarely upon events from the war and different experiences and attitudes towards it. It is the quietest of the films, the most contemplative, and the most introspective. There are, essentially, only two main characters.

Elzbieta now lives in America, but is re-visiting Warsaw to ask an elderly ethics professor, Zofia, questions pertaining to her childhood, in regards to when she was a little girl, in February, 1943. She listens to stories about ethics in the professor’s lecture hall. The first dilemma posed by one of the students is the situation faced by the doctor in Dekalog 2. In a nice touch, after hearing the story, the professor says “I know how this story ends…Warsaw is a small city.” It makes it seem that the little, largely disconnected community portrayed in Dekalog is real.
                    

The second moral dilemma is posed by Elzbieta. It will be, of course, circumstances involving herself as a little girl, and somehow Zofia will be involved. As a little six year old girl, it seems, Elzbieta was hiding in a cellar outside the Warsaw ghetto with Catholic occupants and was forced to seek a new hideout with her custodian. She was taken to the home of the would-be foster parents on the proviso she had been christened, but at the last minute, the Catholic couple changed their mind, saying that, as good Catholics, they could not commit the sin of lying. In this instance, the child was turned away to face an almost certain death. Elzbieta was placed in grave danger many years ago for reasons she still cannot fathom. It becomes readily apparent, watching the effect of the story upon Zofia, that Zofia was in the party that rejected Elzbieta. Elzbieta is therefore forcing her to examine her conscience, and at the same time seek answers. It is to Zofia’s immense relief that the former little girl is still alive.

For the rest of their evening together, and the next day (Zofia insists Elzbieta stays the night with her), Zofia will cling to her, desperate to feel loving and supportive of the woman who was once a child that she let down. When Elzbieta explores the buildings in which the events of 1943 took place, we can see it is still an eerie place at night, with lots of shadows and poor lighting, and people living precarious lives. She leaves Zofia by the car for quite some time, and Zofia feels compelled to try and locate her, beginning to feel terrified that she may lose Elzbieta in these surrounds for a second time.
                    

Later, in Zofia’s flat, Zofia kneads Elzbieta shoulders and apologizes. She admits she sent her to a seemingly certain death. She tells Elzbieta “…nothing is more important than the life of a child.” In other words, her position has altered. She has become less morally rigid in her thinking, and thankfully for the both of them it is not too late. She is shaking as she says it. She is full of sad regrets, and her decision has haunted her whole life. At these times Kieslowski films Zofia in Bergmanesque close-up. It accentuates her benevolent features. Zofia has been involved in great service to the community since. She also has her reasons for acting the way she did.

Elzbieta has one more mission in my mind. Zofia knows the whereabouts of the people who were going to shelter her from the Gestapo. She takes her there the next morning. Elzbieta thanks a man who helped save her many years ago- he is a dressmaker now- however he has no interest in talking about the war. This part of her story will remain unresolved. The war has complicated people’s lives immeasurably. The film ends with the dressmaker looking at the two figures on the pavement outside his window. It would make a great study one day: the use of windows in the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski.
                    

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Dekalog 7: turmoil in a child's world


                  
Dekalog 7 is about the triangular relationship between a little girl, aged six, and her adopted mother and her real mother. The odd thing is, the adopted mother is really grandma, and the real mother grandma’s daughter, and at the start of the film the three live in dislocated fashion in their Warsaw apartment. The plot is very simple, it’s filmed in a relatively straightforward fashion, and the actors are not as engaging as the principal actors in the previous five films.

There are the sounds of a child screaming at the start of the film. The camera hovers outside the Warsaw apartment block, moving around as if to decide which of the apartments to enter for the story. It as if there is potentially interesting stories to tell in every apartment. It finds the one with the screaming child by the help of a newly lighted window.
                 

The premise of the story is set. The young, real mother, Majka,  is heading off for Canada, planning to take the child, Ania, with her. Ania is screaming because of a reoccurring nightmare and it takes a long time for her to receive attention. Majka tries to comfort her to no avail, and grandma, named Ewa, who has been acting as Ania’s mother for all of the child’s six years, aggressively pushes her away, and says “you don’t know how to comfort her.”

Majka visits her at the kindergarten, peering over the fence like a stranger, thick iron bars separating them. Majka then cleverly ‘kidnaps’ her little girl from a pantomime concert that she was enjoying with grandma. Ania doesn’t complain, even when she is whisked off to a strange man’s house (who happens to be her estranged father). Like Maisie in the Henry James novel, Ania is completely unaware of the adult turmoil about her.

When Ewa gets home from her miserable day of losing Ania at the pantomime, she doesn’t ring the police because she knows deep down her daughter has finally exorcised her rights. Majka, meanwhile, is shown walking Ania in glorious sunshine, tenderly explaining the truth to her daughter. Ania can only think of it in fairytale terms. Obviously it’s unfathomable.
                    

Majka hopes to find some stability, or somewhere to hide, at Ania’s father’s place. However their relationship grew cold years ago. Wojtek was Majka’s teacher at school, a school in which Majka’s mother was headmistress. Scandal was averted but it has meant that Ania has grown up in unfortunate circumstances. Ania as usual is blissfully unaware. She lies, slowly falling asleep, on top of some stuffed toys.

As with all custody stories, it is the child that suffers from all of this. There are the nightmares; the urge to ‘pee’ when she is nervous; the way she won’t let go of her father’s finger when falling asleep; the fact that she overhears the murky adult stories of those that are supposed to support her; the way she is transported around the countryside, hiding, with her mother, slung over her mother’s shoulder like baggage; being in earshot of the awful negotiations made over the phone about her future. Like the twig she throws into the water, Ania is drifting toward an uncertain future.
                                         

Ania forces the adults around her to confront truths. Wojtek needs to come to terms with the fact that he actually is a father. Majka is recognising that she must take control of the situation and act as the girl’s mother. It is only really Ewa that can’t accept the situation. She is determined- and she succeeds- in prolonging the artificial situation in which she pretends to be Ania’s mother. Perhaps the biggest indictment in her role is the story that she tried to breastfeed Ania whilst Majka was on camp. This, and the fact that the concealment, and the desperate need to avoid scandal, means Ania ultimately suffers.

We witness scenes in which things could be so much better, that adherence to avoiding the scandal is the real scandal. Wotjek and Ania in their brief moments together are tender. Majka really wants to bond properly with Ania, but is impatient. “Call me mother” she sobs, but her daughter will only refer to her as Majka.

In the end it is Majka who is drifting toward an uncertain future, alone on a train, pulling out from a platform and being watched by her parents and her confused little girl. Films that conclude with train departures often have sad endings.
                  

Monday, December 31, 2012

Dekalog 6: trying to make connections


I wrote this discussion of the sixth Dekalog film some time ago and it appears elsewhere on the blog. Seeing it again hasn’t altered my opinion. A masterful film about the complex lives of disconnected people, again.

                  

A LONELY young man living somewhere in urban Poland lives in a crowded tenement apartment block and becomes fixated on a woman of around 30-35 who lives in a similar sized apartment opposite. Like James Stewart in ‘Rear Window’, he finds the goings on in the apartment interesting and becomes obsessed, watching with a well -trained pair of binoculars. The woman occasionally takes a lover, other times going to the fridge or unwinding from a busy day, often in underwear, oblivious to the hungry male eyes peering at her.

Krzysztof Kieslowski is an imaginative and daring film director, somewhat in the style of Michael Haneke, in that his audience is often made to feel unsettled. Each time I see one of his films I know I am in for an engaging and truthful ride about ordinary people who somehow find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. ‘A Short Film About Death’ was about an unhinged young man, who seemed to be like many troubled people you might find anywhere on the streets, who happens to unexpectedly murder a taxi driver in bloody and gruesome circumstances. The murder is compelling in its unexpectedness and the taxi driver is totally vulnerable and unsuspecting. It is the manner of the killing that is compelling. He takes a long time to die, after prolonged attempts at strangulation, only to find that he is finally bludgeoned by a rock. Even the killer seems to be grimacing by this point. Like Macbeth, he goes so far, and there seems to be no turning back. Both ‘Death’ and ‘Love’ are part of a long series of films based on the 10 commandments under the title ‘Decalogue.’

 ‘A Short Film About Love’, begins with the young man named Tomek  breaking into what looks like some sort of laboratory, stealing a telescope, intercut with scenes of the young woman in her flat playing cards and pacing about with a paintbrush in a state of undress. When he gets home he begins what will become a nightly ritual of preying on her with his hungry eyes. Of course the film won’t be much unless, like ‘Rear Window’, the subject is interesting and complex in some way. The young woman doesn’t let him down.
                                    

To add intrigue to the personality of the young voyeur, we get glimpses of the  lonely home life he shares with his doting grandmother. She ironically asks him to watch ‘Miss Poland’ on the TV, an innocent form of voyeurism, very different to his own version of Miss Poland across the way.

There are phone calls, ones he makes to her, as if the dispassionate distant view of her isn’t enough and he needs to hear her voice. Then he makes the discovery that she has a lover and the sexual embrace turns him away momentarily from the telescope, just when we thought this might ramp up his attention. So, it seems, he is curiously emotionally involved. Another lover.  The same response. This time, in one of the few comic moments in the film, he picks up the phone when he sees the embrace and rings the gas company about an imaginary leak, in her apartment. He is going to do his best to interrupt things. The gas man’s voice on the phone says ‘don’t light anything.’ When he hangs up he immediately lights a cigarette. The gas men come around, superfluously of course, and it works a treat. The love making is disrupted, the mood broken. Tomek laughs devilishly, and in a sudden burst of anger punches a hole in his wardrobe door. It is unsettling and is the first sign of potential derangement.
                              

There is the expected anger and disbelief when Tomek catches up with the woman in the street and tells her he watches her through her window. Later, when the woman challenges Tomek over the reasons he watches her, he tells her in candid fashion it is because he loves her. When she asks him if he wants to kiss her, sleep with her, her experience enters a new realm. She is an object of brutal desire for men, but Tomek is more complicated. He is simply different. He has an emotional need for her that her playboys don’t have. And she finds it fascinating, and appealing.

When Tomek does summon the courage to see her again, he appeals to her in traditional fashion by knocking at her door and asking her for a date for ice cream!  The date organised, Tomek whirls around in circles dragging his milk crate. Kieslowski is presenting Tomek as a child, emotionally stunted. He craves attention and affection and is spectacularly inexperienced. These two are a very unusual match. In a beautifully realised scene, played simply and almost without music, the woman can see two lovers behind her in the café, the male lovingly caressing the female’s hands. She wants this too. She establishes that Tomek has taken her mail, has watched her for a year, and has sent her false money orders via his job at the post office- basically acknowledges in an understated way that this is ‘harassment’:  and yet she wants him to caress her hands.
                              

At her apartment Tomek can see where she lives for the first time without a telescopic lens. Her tenderness and close proximity are unbearable for him, and in a scene vaguely reminiscent of Ian McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach’, Tomek  suddenly runs home, humiliated.

Shifts occur. She turns casual lovers away. She has real feelings for another man. And she briefly turns into voyeur as she tries to tenderly watch over Tomek as she fears for his mental health. As a basin of water turns red with blood, we remember that Tomek has been associated with blood before, blood-red as in violence. Her colour has been white, as in spilt milk when she cried one evening and turned the milk bottle over. She has been in need of the milk of human kindness since the beginning and having found it, is desperate to keep it.

Towards the end of the film the roles are reversed as the woman’s tenderness is awakened and she continually looks out for Tomek who has been recuperating in hospital. She becomes a kind of tender voyeur, as his telescope is replaced by her opera glasses. In another interesting reversal at the very end, she watches over her apartment from Tomek’s telescope in a kind of fantasy play, and can see herself crying over the spilt milk from an earlier scene in which she is crying and at her lowest ebb. Suddenly Tomek appears in the frame and comforts her, tenderly. It is how things might have been. The tragedy therefore is the distance that the two lonely lovers can’t bridge. The music in these final moments is haunting and slow and meditative. This film is a kind of grown up ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and moving in every way. The emotions may have initially appeared cheap but they have turned in the end to something profound.
                                                                  
 

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Dekalog 5: two cold-blooded murders


                     

‘A Short Film About Killing’ (Dekalog 5) is rightly recognised as a seminal piece in Kieslowski’s career. It’s more political than the others, the most violent, and probably carries the most emotional weight. The subject is a young man, Jacek Lozar, who is a drifter, wandering around Warsaw, without any obvious purpose (besides taxi hunting), headed straight for trouble. He is on edge and dangerous, and clearly psychotic. However, his monstrous capability is not easily apparent. He begins the film as an anti-social outsider, pushing a young man over in the public lavatory, and finding it difficult to relate to others. In an alleyway he watches the brutal bashing of one man by two others, as if he is watching a casual argument between two wild cats. Bored, he rolls a rock over the ledge of a bridge and causes chaos on the freeway below, but is oblivious to the outcome. Then we see him, suddenly, in a cheap café, ominously winding rope around and around his right hand, and the mood of the film darkens. Eventually Jacek commits the horrible, cold-blooded and opportunistic murder of a taxi driver, and pays the ultimate price for this unprovoked and bloodthirsty action. The way Kieslowski manipulates us, and the way we feel about both Jacek and the murder, contribute to the reason why the film is successful and compelling.

There is another vital thread in this film, the third key character. Piotr becomes qualified as a defence lawyer. His interest is in the idea of perpetrator as victim, and he will become an excellent supporter of Jacek. To Piotr, justice is a ‘giant machine’ where individuals become lost. He wants to meet and ‘understand people’, a view that is at odds with the justice system as depicted in the film. Cleverly, Kieslowski has Piotr’s views overlap with shots of Jacek wandering the streets. Not only will Piotr come to defend Jacek, he will be the only one who tries to understand him as well.
               

Jan is the taxi driver that Jacek murders. He is essentially moral and likeable (some would disagree with this), and, introduced at the start, is a reasonably fully developed character before he is killed. Just like it was a chance encounter that two young Liverpool boys came across James Bulger in a Bootle shopping centre, it is a chance encounter that it is Jan that is behind the wheel of the taxi that Jacek hires. Ironically, a number of shots show that he works hard to keep his taxi clean. It will be marked with the stain of blood before too long. Equally ironically, Jan makes a moral judgement about customers on two previous occasions, by driving off and rejecting their fare, before he fatally accepts Jacek’s services. The shot of Jan driving away from the harmless drunks is interspersed with a shot of Jacek readying his hands with the rope he will use for his strangulation.
                                     

Jacek is enquiring about taxi drivers long before he encounters Jan. It is a pre-meditated murder. The deed is done off a quiet track just out of town. The murder is grisly and because of Jacek’s lack of expertise and experience, it takes far too long for Jan to die. It needs to be noted that although it is a shockingly callous murder, Jacek is repulsed by his own actions throughout. There is something like Macbeth’s ‘who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him’ about it.

From about the midway part of the film onwards, Kieslowski deals with issues regarding the Polish justice system. It doesn’t seem to matter how Jacek is captured. The point is that he is to be hanged for his crime, despite the best efforts of Piotr for leniency. Jacek appears like he is a little boy as he leaves the courtroom, condemned, his father passing on some cigarettes. Piotr seems broken and doubts his abilities, until he is assured there was nothing more he could do. Jacek had as much chance, it seems, as Tom Robinson in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird.’ His comradely wave as Jacek is escorted to the prison van is a rare sign of warmth for Jacek, and he later relates how the incident brought tears to his eyes.

Kieslowski makes the most of the cold, grey walls, the sharp mechanical sounds of doors closing, the formidable hang man’s tools- the knotted rope, the creaking winding mechanism, the chilling clatter of the trapdoor opening, the little plastic tray that sits ominously underneath, the rolling up of the sleeves- all of the elements of the preparation for death are coldy confronting.
                    

Lawyer and doomed client have half an hour together, in scenes reminiscent of ‘Dead Man Walking.’ These are telling moments as we discover the human side of Jacek, including sad details like his remembrance of the death of his little 12 year old sister. He recalls the tragic accident with moving emotion. He is desperate for news of his mother. Again, he is like a little boy. The only time that Jacek smiles in the film- and it is a lovely, endearing smile- is when he makes a nice, innocent connection with two young girls at a café window.

All this is short lived, however. The State is eager to get on with their job. Little things like why Jacek committed his crime, and how history has impacted his actions, are quite unimportant.

Jacek is filled with fear as one might imagine, as he smokes a cigarette during his final moments. It is all played out graphically and emotionally, as the court performs its final officious justice and Jacek trembles, contorted. He breaks down hysterically, then quickly after is made a dangling corpse.

Kielslowski seems less objective here than in any of the rest of his short films. It is, undoubtedly, a film that is politically charged against capital punishment. The psyche of the man behind the murder is explored near the end, and the disregard as to who he really is, is telling. As Piota says earlier on, he was in the vicinity of Jacek when Jacek wrapped the cords of strangulation around his hands- ‘I might have done something.’ This is, I think, the crux of the matter. Not really Piota, but someone could have done something. What does it suggest about society when avoidable things like this happen? It is the James Bulger story all over again.

Finally, this film is a beautiful film to look at. There is very little colour- occasionally it seeps through- I remember the baby blue colour of a taxi, for example- but usually it is grainy, and murky with mostly greys and browns, sort of early Van Gogh colours. It makes Warsaw look grim and unforgiving, not a warm, supportive environment at all.