Word: piesiewicz
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Kieslowski and his gifted screenwriting colleague, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, knew that drama begins with the human face; it is a sponge for the viewer's emotional complicity. So the camera takes closeup mug shots of faces in love or anxiety. Or it crouches furtively, behind a tree, in a closet like a fretful nephew or an avid voyeur. It watches ordinary people (including some of the most beautiful actresses in Europe) tangling with moral demons, holding on to what they were taught to believe or--this being real life in Poland just after martial law--what they have learned to settle...
Neither Kieslowski nor Piesiewicz was a practicing Catholic. They were interested in examining the relevance of old laws in a Catholic country in a postmoral age. Decalogue, Five, which was made into a longer piece called A Short Film About Killing, shows two brutal, useless murders. In the first a drifter, for no special reason, strangles a taxi driver; the scene lasts seven excruciating minutes. In the second the killer is hanged by the state; that execution takes only a moment, but it is no less ugly or vindictive. The state, like individuals, has few reasons, many excuses. Kieslowski absolves...
...maybe not -- to make a moral point, or just because they feel like it. They resemblehanging judges, and sometimes they must feel uneasy about their power over life and death, love and loneliness. Perhaps that is what prodded Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski and his writing collaborator, Krzysztof Piesiewicz (himself a lawyer), to create Three Colors: Red, a movie about a judge racked by guilt, regret and his need to keep eavesdropping on other people's crimes and pain...
...final installment in the Kieslowski-Piesiewicz Blue, White and Red trilogy. The films treat the subjects of liberty, equality and fraternity in three different countries (France, Poland, Switzerland). Red was shot in Geneva, with a mostly Swiss cast, yet when the Swiss submitted the film for a foreign-language Oscar, the word came down that Red was ineligible -- guilty, apparently, of insufficient Swissness. The decision was stupid. Someone should tell the Motion Picture Academy that films are made by individuals, not by nations...
...earned world-class status in the mid-'80s with The Decalogue (a 10-part Polish TV series of modern fables, each illustrating one of the Commandments), is in an impish mood here. He finds hairpin turns and deadpan delight in the sexual and political intrigue devised by screenwriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz. And Zamachowski, who has some of Dustin Hoffman's molelike ingenuity, plays Karol Karol (Charlie Charlie in Polish) as a Chaplin figure hatching a Kafka plot...
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