Review of A Short Film About Love (1988) by Jacek S — 09 May 2008

"Short Film About Love" is one of Kieslowski's masterpieces and one of the best movies ever made. It is perfect. It is one of those rare pictures in which you wouldn't want to change a single frame, or a gesture in an actor, or add or cut out anything. It is a crowning example of a masterful storytelling, it works like a Swiss clock.

"Short Film About Love" is diablo-intelligent double-dealing piece. While its subject is dealing with being in love, in the end it is really about loneliness, as we know, opposite pole of it. Young, sensitive Tomek is in love and he really doesn't know what to do with it. Magda, gorgeous woman, on the other end knows exactly what love is and where it can led one, being now emotionally crippled and bitter.

Kieslowski brilliantly, unnoticeably shifts from one point of view (that of young Tomek's) to another (Magda's) showing us that any emotional contact has its (sometimes, as we can see here, deadly) consequences, that people, not matter how we would perceive them - infant, unexperienced or complexed - have feelings and respecting them is something that makes us living humans, not robots who fuck around without giving it much thought, making others suffer for our selfish needs or reducing making love to ejaculation. Magda feels compelled to undone her cruel behaviour and by searching out Tomek she finds out what her real emotional state of being is. But there is always hope in seeing oneself, as if you were looking at the mirror and knew where to start to change yourself...