Review of A Short Film About Love (1988) by Justin B — 29 Aug 2009

Between this and Three Colors: White (my favorite Kieslowski film, despite its IMMENSE problems), I think the director might be something of a sexist. Oh, sure, Blue and Red have wonderful roles for women, etc., and I certainly don't mean to say he's a misogynist in that he hates women. No, he's a Romantic sexist, which is even worse. His films all start with some banal philosophical absolute (i.e. love, fraternity, equality, the categorical imperative) and he uses his simplistic characterizations to make rote and often conservative judgments about a very infantile morality--his films are ALWAYS didactic, he wants to be seen as a wise man but like all wise men comes off as something of a charlatan. The lesson here is that there exists a realm of purely intellectual love which can liberate us from our prisons of flesh and worldly desires. Naturally it's the man who comes to teach the decadent woman his new gospel of spiritual love, and she is the whore, her name is even Magdalene. Kieslowski creates tautological worlds with no outside frame of reference, so of course all of this seems terribly lifelike and true, until one stops to think about it for a moment. I would hardly call Magda cynical or bitter, but realistic (or perhaps even materialist); Kieslowski wishes her to turn to a yearning for the metaphysical and unreal. Again, naturally, voyeurism (that of the wise director behind his camera, the wanker-cum-philosopher) becomes the mode to enlightenment, and idealization is idealized. (At least Three Colors: Red had its judge smash his recording equipment, seeing the flaw in such a one-way approach to interaction). As for myself, I cannot see the actions of Tomek as anything except parasitic and destructive, hinging upon a fear of woman's sexuality and a need to "redeem" her from the same.

I'm ALMOST tempted to see in "A Short Film..." a parody of Bresson's films, with their sometimes forced and bizarre movements towards grace, but as disagreeable as Mr. Bresson can be thematically, he is first and foremost a brilliant stylist, whereas Kieslowski strikes me again and again as a decadent, lingering fetishistically over clothes, sheets, tools, objects, and in so highlighting the tactile and physical, his films become paradoxically unreal. There is no cultural analysis, no sense of how this situation came to be; instead he strives for an artificial universality so that the film will seem as much at home in Poland as in France as in the States as in the UK etc.

The championing of Mr. Kieslowski during the late 80's and early 90's does not surprise me, as his dilettantism and earnest decadence seem to me emblematic of that era: the years of the art film as erotic yearning instead of the art film as analysis or discourse. His influence has started to wane, at last, but who has come in to fill the void except even worse nihilists?