There are some points in common between this movie ("Honour the Sabbath Day") and the third one in the six Rohmerian Moral tales series, "Ma nuit chez Maud", since the first sequences (ill-concealed feelings of desire born in the inmost recesses of the soul during the midnight mass), up to the reassuring epilogue. "Dekalog 3" is a detailed account of a restless night on the "streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead (you) to an overwhelming question" (I know these verses are from "The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S.Eliot, my favorite poem by far, but they are more than suitable to describe the situation) between an unreliable husband and a seducer affected by a solitude syndrome, ideally linked to the Rohmerian characters Suzanne, Maud, Haydee and Chloé. This episode is completely plunged into an alienating nocturnal atmosphere described in a very impersonal way; as expression of his emotional detachment the director keeps his distance from the matter being represented, telling the hard truth about the potential destruction of a family without any frills, describing the despairing remembrance of a nostalgic past full of unhealed wounds with a few special touches of his genius. A sort of Scorsesian "After hours", lacking of every grotesque features and plunged in a metabolizing melancholy that leaves a bitter taste in our mouths at the sight of Ewe's touching persistence, at the sound of her imploring voice, at the tearing awareness of her past and future solitude. Ghastly lights of the town can be seen everywhere: street lamps, headlights, milicja's blue beams, dazzling lights, neon lamps shedding a cold light, blinks in the wet, smooth asphalt, reflecting images against the background of a real life drama concerning the life of ordinary people. The report is strictly impersonal, cold and detached, molded like wax from a shapeless substance in Kieslowski's hands, sweetened with a sprinkling of human sentiments to soften the asexual materiality of a "brief encounter" between two ill-matched sentiments: a coldness cleansed from the slightest shadow of passion and a bitterness striving to force a crystallized situation of stalemate. And not by chance dreary greenish tonalities of an anonymous station with closed circuit cameras tinge with disappointment the epilogue of this story of ordinary dreariness framed within the context of a distressing urban landscape, recalling some Wendersian stereotypes of industrial subculture.
Review of Dekalog, trzy
A detailed account of a restless night between an unreliable husband and a seducer affected by a solitude syndrome.
19 March 2005
Warning: Spoilers