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Perhaps Kieslowski’s most romantic film, A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE is an erotic, ironic interpretation of the Seventh Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.” Kieslowski takes a clichéd situation and gives it several ironic twists. Tomek, an introverted nineteen-year-old virgin, living with his aged mother in a squalid Warsaw flat, becomes obsessed with the woman who lives across the way: Magda, a handsome, liberated woman in her thirties who entertains a steady stream of lovers. Tomek’s obsession escalates from voyeurism to mischief – he interrupts her love-making with an elaborate hoax – to invasion (he intercepts her mail). Kieslowski masterfully subverts our expectations with a series of tonal and narrative surprises, turning the film from a familiar study of adolescent erotic obsession into a darkly romantic tale about loneliness and connection. Described by one critic as Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW remade by Eric Rohmer, A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE is “a near-masterpiece. . . . Funny, ironic, and a little frightening and sad too. It knows how to play on the emotions and its apparent simplicities are, in fact, quite complex. Above all, it is brilliantly and simply made, so that you know you are in the presence of a real filmmaker” (Derek Malcolm). Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien chose this as one of the ten greatest films in the history of cinema. JQ
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