Dekalog: The Ten Commandments Part 2

This didn't quite catch me as much as the first part, most probably due to the somewhat unlikeable character and the slightly-too-slow pace for someone half-exhausted such as myself.

But putting that aside for a moment and trying to think more objectively, I find myself admiring the marriage of pace and subject matter.

This film concerns a woman whose husband is dying in hospital and who carries a baby that is not his. Her dilemma is this, in her own words: if her husband lives, then she cannot keep the baby. She has always wanted children, and this is her only chance to do so. Up until this moment, she thought she couldn't have them.

The film revolves around the series of encounters she has with the doctor caring for her husband. The unlikeable character mentioned earlier is not her but the doctor, a stern, unloving man numbed to humanity by the apparent death of his wife and children, the story of which he re-tells to his cleaner in moments interspersed with the "real" action. He eschews most other human contact and interacts verbally with grunts or the bare minimum of words. He has survived the tragedy of his family it seems through a mixture of the certainties of medicine and the tweeting of his pet budgie.

This life only now being half-lived, the slow counting of days, is mirrored in the husband lying in a hospital ward. He is half-comatose, half-dead already, his link with the outside world a monotonous dripping of rusted water from the ceiling. This is perhaps ever-so-slightly heavy handed from Kieslowski, as with the final shot of a wasp struggling - but making it - out of a cup of juice. Like the husband, it clings to life, barely managing to pull itself out of death. But perhaps that's the film student in me. It certainly works, there's no question about that; in fact the image of the wasp crawling up the spoon out of this red liquid is potentially iconic, and a wonderful metaphor for the seemingly miraculous recovery of the husband.

What this episode does is confirm my feelings about Kieslowski's genius. Part 1 was not an aberration, and my memories of the episode known as "A Short Film About Love" serve to further that impression. He has the ability to say a great deal in so few images, so few words. In cinema, that is a rare - and necessary - quality.