Non desiderare la donna d'altri

A gripping and intriguing story about loving someone from afar. This is one of those films that I randomly pick up from whatever thread I come across, and now, having seen it, I am really surprised that it's mostly unknown. From the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski---I know, good luck on pronouncing his name, this is the extended version of the sixth episode of The Decalogue. Tomek is nineteen years old, a single guy who works in a post office. Every night, he spies on Magda, a middle-aged woman who lives in the building across. He falls in love with her and decides to profess his love one day after seeing her cry the previous night. At first, Magda doesn't take him seriously and she eventually hurts him. What follows after is both tragic and moving. This film is really spell-binding, from the powerful human emotions it displays to its sincere silent moments. It is a true gem of cinema, a special story waiting to be told. The characters are very real and the emotions they convey very honest. The obsession and the desperation felt by the protagonists are simply too painful to watch. This film is not readily available to some but it is worth every second of searching.

http://iwascalledclementine.multiply.com/reviews

sorry about the summary title, but i hate pithiness. this is, of course, more than just a film i like. it's beautiful. the scene when the woman fantasizes about what might have been with the boy is heartrending, and you don't have to have lived in communist East Europe to understand her sense of loneliness. others think that "A Short Film about Killing" was the stand out from the Dekalog, but to me this is the director's finest achievement, and the harshest and boldest treatment of love that you could see on celluloid. The most important film of my life.

Kieslowski's movies are very unique in the sense of reflecting on feelings. One needs to think outside of the box and try to go beyond the surface... His goal is not to create an average love story, but to put love bare as it is in the center. What is love? One could list a number of adjectives, to say the least; but instead let's just use one sentence: love wants nothing in return. To love and being loved, two sides of a coin, is presented to us in this beautiful movie. Little conversation, nice music, great frames and shots, well-chosen actors, actresses, although very few; intense, touching, and serious.

It helps a bit if the watcher knows some about Eastern-European culture. But it is by no means necessary. One should only have been given the gift of being loved and to have loved.

Unlike the other masterpiece in his Decalogue, Killing, in 'A Short Film About Love' Kieslowski treats the subject of love with an extraordinarily delicate, rather than a polemic, eye. As ever he manages to express more with subtlety than most directors ever will with expression: it is rather what is not said, what is not expressed, that leaves an indelible mark upon us.

Olaf Lubaszenko's central performance as the boy is, rather than 'opaque' as it has been termed, engrossing from the start. His innocence and fragility, just like the film's, are an invitation to the intimacy we progressively acquire. We, the film's audience, watch engrossed and exposed just as does he, and, in another sense, does the subject of his observations. His telescope becomes a direct motif; distance, separation, enlargement: all the things the filmmaker provides for the viewer. Thus, at emotional, intellectual and metacinematic levels the film explores its themes: observation and love.

While it may not come to solid conclusions (nor ought it to), the sensitivity with which the director watches his actors is utterly compelling. The resultant negotiation between man and women, subject and observer, viewer and filmmaker is a relationship, a love affair. Perhaps Barthes might have sought to go further, waiting for the end of the film, its 'death', to find psychological and sexual consummation to such an affair, and the film may support such a reading. Even a far less academic approach is sufficient, however, in order to enjoy the work at it appears at face value. We do not need to analyse in order to feel, and it is the film's emotional impact that remains when our brief voyeurism, our visit to the cinema, ends.

I have watched this movie 10 years ago when I was feeling that love was an impossible happiness to achieve and it always accompanied disappointments.

Now that I am a happy man and I am not so pessimistic about love and life. However, this movie still fills my soul with wonder: How can love, disappointments and life be described so beautiful, like a poem, stylish and touching...

I will remember it as long as I believe in love.