This is my favorite episode of the Decalogue because I have dealt with a lot of death in the family and can really relate to two brothers and their relationship with the materials left behind by someone they loved. This is a very touching and personal story that follows the death of the neighbor from Decalogue 8, the stamp collector. His two sons, one a metal rocker and the other a family man, are left with a collection of stamps so valuable they don't know what to do with it, nor even really what it's worth. As they begin to find out, it becomes worth more to them personally than it does valuably, and they find themselves obsessing over the past of a man they didn't much respect before.
In terms of the thematic connotations of the Decalogue, it's one of the few stories that fit so easily into the rule: "Thou shalt not covet they neighbors goods." Once thrown into an almost underground world of something seemingly innocuous as stamp collecting, the brothers learn just how jealously they can guard something so small and fragmentary, and to what lengths they will go to for completion.
But at the heart of the story is two brothers trying subconsciously to hold on to the last vestiges of a father they never really knew, and it's only with the heart-rending tragedy of the ending that they look past what he had to what it all means to them. True to most of Kieslowski's Decalogue, the fifty seemingly slow minutes are packed with levels of narration and symbolic intention that creates a fantastically effective parable on loss and redemption.
--PolarisDiB
In terms of the thematic connotations of the Decalogue, it's one of the few stories that fit so easily into the rule: "Thou shalt not covet they neighbors goods." Once thrown into an almost underground world of something seemingly innocuous as stamp collecting, the brothers learn just how jealously they can guard something so small and fragmentary, and to what lengths they will go to for completion.
But at the heart of the story is two brothers trying subconsciously to hold on to the last vestiges of a father they never really knew, and it's only with the heart-rending tragedy of the ending that they look past what he had to what it all means to them. True to most of Kieslowski's Decalogue, the fifty seemingly slow minutes are packed with levels of narration and symbolic intention that creates a fantastically effective parable on loss and redemption.
--PolarisDiB