Perjury.. It’s not that clear for a while. Long stretches of silence intersect with the information that we collect little by little, forcing us to pay attention to the daily universe surrounding the drama as much as it is. In his building, a doctor (Aleksander Bardini) is followed by a neighbor (Krystyna Janda) so that he can provide him with information on the state of health of her husband (Olgierd Łukaszewicz), cancerous between life and death, treated by the first in the hospital where he officiates. Finally playing cards on the table, Dorota explains her eagerness to him: in love with two men, she is expecting a child other than the dying one. If he dies, she will keep it. If he lives, she will have an abortion. The doctor does not seem to be judging her, but does not consider that he can comment at this stage. His attitude questions the withholding of information in the medical environment, a paternalism opposing, in the name of possible reactions of the interlocutor, the duty to tell the truth. But owe in the name of what? And to whom (this woman not being directly his patient)? Then appears the perjury.
The husband regains strength, the wife
must decide. Cornered, the doctor tells him that the man will die. It is only
an illusory remission A few hours
later, after dark, he was the one who visited him, amazed at his health. To
this one, he explains to him that he will live. Therefore, there are two things,
one to avoid abortion, the doctor lied to the wife, or, to avoid darkening her
last hours, he did the same with the husband. Guilt invades his face. There is
one component of existence that utilitarianism seems unable here to take into
account: the integrity of the person. Someone is denied vital information; would
it be for his well-being or other lives?
Kieślowski's staging unfolds its significance. Fly struggling for its survival by climbing out of the glass where it is trapped, turbid liquids which will return in markers of moral ambiguity and necessity of nuance, window frames encircling faces in dialogue, in their reflection, with their own conscience... The pitfall of stretching a chewing bone to criticism is never far away (the filmmaker, moreover, was instinctively reluctant to attempts at interpretations based on this type of motive).
The sense of detail goes further. Description of
the hospital environment, of a mountaineering club to which the husband
belonged, of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra where Dorota plays among the
strings... By concretely inscribing his drama in the life of the capital,
Kieślowski makes it alive. What might have been thought experiment becomes
intimately touching. By working on its specificity, it improves the
universality of its history which, from conceptual, becomes human.
.jpg)
0 Comments