The template for Dekalog is that we enter a life with its anxieties (a dying husband on a hospital bed, a husband who disappeared on Christmas Eve) and at some point the narrative surface gives way and reveals a more fluid, more interdepentent life of suffering beneath.
This is evident here in a child sister abducted (after a theatric performance no less, after the swirl of fiction) and by next morning she has become a daughter. We explore a bit more but it never amounts to more than drama about the choices we have to make.
The Kieslowski I like, as I am discovering with these Dekalog viewings, is that way he has of visually slipping ahead and back. This is on the more typical end of the spectrum, all about moral anxiety and doublebinds. The ending is both emotional and convenient, poured on as syrup instead of laid out as vision.
This is evident here in a child sister abducted (after a theatric performance no less, after the swirl of fiction) and by next morning she has become a daughter. We explore a bit more but it never amounts to more than drama about the choices we have to make.
The Kieslowski I like, as I am discovering with these Dekalog viewings, is that way he has of visually slipping ahead and back. This is on the more typical end of the spectrum, all about moral anxiety and doublebinds. The ending is both emotional and convenient, poured on as syrup instead of laid out as vision.