This episode of Kieslowski's "Dekalog" is about a Polish ethics professor and a younger American colleague. Unlike most of the other episodes, the eighth episode is dialogue-ridden (far too much for my taste). The central issue is set up in a classroom discussion. [spoilers] The American colleague sits in on the ethics professor's class and retells a true story involving her (unbeknownst to the ethics professor) and the ethics professor. The American colleague was once a young Jewish girl in Nazi occupied Poland seeking help from a Catholic family. It just so happens that the matriarch of the Catholic family was the ethics professor. The American colleague ends her story by saying that the Catholic family turned her away at the last minute because, as good Catholics, they could not lie. She then raises the question as to whether anything was more important than a child's life. The film is my ninth favorite in the series for three reasons. First, though I am usually a sucker for tracking shots, I found the hand-held tracking shots here to be artificial and not well-motivated. Second, the dramatic stories of the past are merely recounted verbally. Finally, there's not a whole lot of interesting chemistry between the ethics professor and the American colleague. Nevertheless, this installment still resonates when the ethics professor confesses: "You are right; no ideal is worth more than the life of a child."
No comments:
Post a Comment