Dekalog: Dekalog, dziewiec (1989)
Season 1, Episode 9
Next to the End
12 August 2006
I'm a bit upset at our filmmaker.

I know that each of these ten is its own little experiment. Each has its own adventure in vision and dreaming. But all ten have an arc as well. Oh, not in the stories; they're good enough in their way. What I mean is the cadence that comes from the difference in how each of these sees.

Some have an eager eye, others lazy. Sometimes the eye is inside the emotional container of the thing. Sometimes, often, the camera is liquid on some surface that is emotionally tipped. They're all different, and together we have a sort of poem in how the rocks are arranged in the sky for us to see as art after we have seen the immediate art by standing on each of them.

So we are nearing the end, and this penultimate eye is essential to giving us distance.

Sure enough, almost everything about this is perfect. Its about spying, about placing yourself to see — hoping to not get hit by what we see and knowing we will.

There's lots of architectural framing, interstitial platforms and invaginations. Its about children lost before they were had, the greatest tragedy.

So why am I miffed, if it is so perfect, so delicately jolting? Because in the final scene he leaves his Kieslowski world and gives us a shot so banal, so ordinary, so conventionally shot we wonder what he was thinking. Its a phone call, alternating between the husband calling and the wife receiving.

Its a Hitchcock-derived shot. Now don't get me wrong, Hitchcock invented the curious, floating camera that Kieslowski (and Chris Doyle) exploit. But his setups are so quoted now that to use one today is almost a matter of parody. And that's what we are left with.

I can only assume that the difference was intended, that our filmmaker wanted to let us know that things will be different now. That it will now be "real" and not a man and woman acting real and watching themselves work at it.

But it is shocking, that call.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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