A Short Film About Love is an extended film version of Dekalog: Six, part of Kieślowski’s ten-part television series, Dekalog, launched in 1988 and which is in Polish. The film is set in Warsaw and tells the story of a naive and inexperienced young man who spies a woman living on the other side of the court and falls in love with her. Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko), an introverted postal worker, has become obsessed with an older woman in his neighborhood, whom he watches through a telescope. When Tomek finds the courage to confess his love, she mockingly tells him that love is an illusion. Afterwards, Tomek falls into a severe depression and attempts suicide, Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska) begins to reconsider her relationship with her voyeur.
The film is a powerful meditation on whether we can really face the realization of our most secret and deepest dreams. To do so, the director masterfully plays with the exchanges between the voyeur and his “subject,” between romantic love and carnal lust, which are sensitively handled not only narratively, but also visually. Kieślowski exploits the most intimate and fragile areas of human relationships. The film is a reflection on duality and the possibility of bringing this duality together. We witness a constant interplay between “here” and “there”, “me” and “you”, “milk” and “blood”, “body” and “soul”, “life” and “death”, etc.
In a way, it can be said that this film is similar to other masterpieces of Kieślowski, but since the main character is a young man, the whole story takes a more passionate pace and a more sensitive course.
Kieślowski treats the subject of love with an extraordinarily delicate, rather than polemical, eye. The biblical reference overloads the story and transforms this realistic film production into an ethereal, dreamlike experience, a foray not only into the minds and hearts of the characters, but also into our own.