A Short Film About Killing
May 16, 2004
“There are moments in life when anything seems possible,” says the young lawyer in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “A Short Film About Killing”, “When your path is clearly laid out before you.” The lawyer has just passed his bar exams, and in a Warsaw café, he toasts his success with his fiancé, little knowing how prophetic his line of fate and wisdom will prove over the next year, and how at that very moment of happiness, the man at the next table would walk out, hail a taxicab, monotonously murder the driver, and become the lawyers first big case; a case against capital punishment, and an indictment of the law system which professes an eye for an eye, despite circumstances. In the gifted hands of the late master, the 80-minute, 1988 film becomes a realistic, somewhat drab representation of mans propensity to disregard each other as an offshoot of living in a country full of poverty and loneliness; it is one of the most perceptively disturbing diatribes about murder ever made, and now, released on a superb DVD by Kino, its muted colors, distressing characters, and ill view of humanity and injustice is finally widely available to the Western world, if the Western world is ready to digest it.
When Kieslowski made his landmark, 10-hour TV series “The Decalogue” in 1987, 10 separate films based on the Ten Commandments, co-written by his frequent collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz, the director said he would extend two of the episodes into feature films. He chose episodes five and six, murder and adultery, to transfer to film with the additional twenty minutes of footage remarkably altering the original hour-long episodes into self-contained masterpieces purely about loneliness, chance, and human interaction. Where “The Decalogue” is intentionally focused on the Commandments, and religion, these two extended films, out of that framing context, stand alone in their examinations of human forms, both bleak and haunting, and with “A Short Film About Killing”, which scandalized audiences at Cannes in ’88, winning the Grand Jury prize, Kieslowski was able to honestly place his feelings about his country, and its waning Communist-ruled courts into sharp, biter focus, and the results are harrowing, angry, and ultimately sad. “I wanted to describe the Polish world, a world which is quite terrible and dull,” the great director once said about his country, at the time only two years away from Communist disintegration, and his bleak, introspective film, which opens with an image of a dead rat, followed by an image of a hanged black cat, “…a world where people don’t have any pity for each other, a world of people living alone.”
The remarkable film is about three men, two murders, open wounds, and everlasting hurt. On a dreary fall afternoon in Warsaw, a 19-year-old boy named Jacek (Miroslaw Baka) wanders through the streets, throwing rocks off an overpass, ducking state policemen, and languishing in life’s cruel banalities. Before he gets into the taxicab of an equally immoral man (Jan Tesarz), he stops at a café for a cream pastry, cutting off a piece of rope which will be his mode of murder in a few moments. Meanwhile, the young lawyer, Piotr (Krzysztof Globisz) is celebrating his career triumph, unaware of the brooding teenager at the next table. At the time, the three men (who have shared equal narrative time, bouncing around Warsaw, taking in the concrete sites of a city as exciting as a piece of stale bread) know not of each other, but when young, angry Jacek gets into the taxi, which sports a rubber Devil head on its windshield, their worlds will collide (eventually in a two shot ellipsis that spans nearly 12 months, from the time of the murder to the end of the subsequent trial), and Kieslowski gives us no safe answers as to why. By the end, both the driver and Jacek are graphically executed, in real time, leaving the lawyer alone and shattered to question his career, his government, and a society that could produce such hate and misunderstanding. This is a film that is barren on the surface, but alive with debate and politics, superficiality and anger, and ultimately, with an overwhelming sense of loss, through happenstance, and uncontrollable fate.
It is that last point, the one where chance screws you over, which runs throughout the films (the early political documentaries, the mid-career realist features, and the late-career ironic masterpieces) of Kieslowski. After Communism crumbled in ’89, the director would make four more films before his untimely death in ’96, each one co-produced outside of Poland, and each one about the ineffectuality of one person to control his or her own life path. In “The Double Life of Veronique”, twin girls are separated at birth, and only realize their connection when one dies of heart failure, never meeting her exact double. In the famous trilogy “Blue”, “White” and “Red”, three women each suffer for, and are profoundly altered by the circumstances involving the men in their lives (death, divorce, discovery, respectively), but, for my money, those post-Communist features, no matter how great they are (the ‘Colors Trilogy’ is arguably one of the great achievements in film history), somehow fall just short of the poetic power of “The Decalogue”, and the resentment and finality seething through “A Short Film About Killing”.
The actions and motives to the film are baffling and often hard to decipher. Young Jacek, so bitter, and so unabashedly gloomy, kills the taxi driver for no reason, and pays the ultimate price with his life, but does the fact that we’ve seen the driver in an unflattering light before his death soften the blow? Or does it matter that we learn of the boys attachment to a sister who was tragically run over, on his watch, five years earlier, prompting him to move to Warsaw (“Sometimes I wonder, if she hadn’t died, if I would have left…everything could have been different.”) and a life of crime and loneliness. And to, are we to feel justice when he is executed, because the initial murder itself (7-minutes long in actual screen time) is so absolutely brutal to behold? Kieslowki wants us to ask these questions, but he doesn’t necessarily want us to come up with a definite answer; it’s more about the expectations answers would provide than the answers themselves, for, if Jacek was a product of his own inability to save his sister, than, isn’t it safe to say that the State’s decision to execute him based on the facts of the cabbie murder (despite personal flaws) is, in a way, a kind of spiritual justice? Death on the inside is only a step short of death on the outside; be it premeditated or State sanctioned, it’s going to happen eventually.
Kieslowski is sly to highlight the lawyer’s painful heartbreak at losing the case, and his friendship with his client. Essentially, this puts a negative light on capital punishment (ala Oshima’s “Death by Hanging”), but, for what it’s worth, his hammer is leveled more on humanity than it would appear to be slammed on the court system of Communist Poland, and this double attack, brutal and honest, filmed with such drab, jaundiced green filters by master cinematographer Slowomir Idziak, is what makes the film so penetrating and important. It’s not enough that the kid, the lawyer, and the cabdriver have to co-exist in an industrial wasteland, ripe with poverty and Big Brother’s watchful eye, they have to do so by set guidelines; anything else (the two murders, for example) would be uncivilized.
“To be or not to be?” In Kieslowski’s worldview, that is one sticky proposition to handle.
“A Short Film About Killing” has been released on DVD through Kino-on-Video with a wealth of extras, including Kieslowski’s wonderful 1977, 17-minute documentary, “A Night Porter’s Point of View”.
by Adam Suraf