"Dekalog" Dekalog, szesc (1990)

Director:

Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers:

Krzysztof Piesiewicz (written by) &
Krzysztof Kieslowski (written by)

TV Series:

"Dekalog" (1989)

Original Air Date:

8 June 1990 (Season 1, Episode 6)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

"Thou shalt not commit adultery" - a shorter, scaled-down version of 'A Short Film About Love' , with a less complex plot and a different ending...

Plot Keywords:

Polish

Cast

Grazyna Szapolowska	...	Magda
Olaf Lubaszenko	...	Tomek
Stefania Iwinska	...	Godmother
Artur Barcis	...	Young Man
Stanislaw Gawlik	...	Postman
Piotr Machalica	...	Roman
Rafal Imbro	...	Bearded Man
Jan Piechocinski	...	Blond Man
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Malgorzata Rozniatowska	...	Angry Postmaster

Also Known As:

Dekalog: Decalogue Six: Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery (#1.6) (International: English title)
Dekalog: Dekalog, sześć (#1.6) (Poland)

Runtime:

58 min | USA:60 min | Argentina:60 min

Country:

Poland

Language:

Polish

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Argentina:16

Filming Locations:

Warsaw, Poland

Company:

Polish TV

Movie Connections:

Edited from Krótki film o milosci (1988)

Cat and Mouse

Cat-and-mouse game of voyeur and victim, with an exchange of roles between the two about halfway through. Seems to have been well-received by the critics, but I found it too coy and contrived, not to mention compromised by a lack of credibility: The supposedly naive pure idealistic love of the voyeur, a 19 year-old boy, fails to acknowledge the inherent ugliness of voyeurism. Voyeurism entails a sinister imbalance of power between watcher and watched; it consists of cruelty and exploitation more than love; all of which the woman seemed to overlook much too easily. If the boy truly loved her, he would have stopped stalking her; his isn't love, but disease. The whole affair is intellectual structuralism at its worst, a plot concocted to demonstrate a point. Apparently, the woman spied upon "adulterates" the boy's love by humiliating him, as well as being unfaithful to her lover and unfaithful to love itself by her cynicism (thus violating the commandment, though unmarried). Her repentance and reversal seems as sudden and arbitrary as everything else in the film. Silly color coding abounds; the stranger in white (angel of death?) here carries a suitcase and shopping bag. The only intriguing element for me was the surrogate mother's sexual possessiveness, a tickle of evil.