Kieslowski

Weronika seems too delicate for the world; She’s childlike and blissfully adrift. Irene Jacob gives off this quality. Kieslowski cast her because of her shyness, he found it endearing. The way the last segment recalled “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” was likely not accidental, because Weronika seems like a character

The French title of the film suggests a double meaning — La Double Vie de Veronique. Double Vie (vee) is double life … but it sounds so close to Double V (vay), which is French for W. Or, to put it another way, La W de Veronique … Weronika, the Polish version of

In my opinion, Dekalog 4 is Kieslowski’s most difficult and essential artistic statement. This is a dense episode where 20 years of relational subtext comes bursting out, immediately and dangerously. The intense, forced audience trauma of Dekalog 4 is something I have rarely experienced outside of an Ingmar Bergman

Episode 4 of The Dekalog requires a trigger warning. Well, arguably, every episode the series demands one. Episode one, if you’ve lost a child, will devastate you. Episode 2 features abortion and infidelity, issues that trigger many. Episode 3 features infidelity, again, plus a very odd scene that evokes

I’m always amused to hear about various Eastern European superstitions and traditions, because they all have a quality of being made up in the moment. They always leave me wondering, are these actual widely shared beliefs common to region or just a family neurosis passed down through the ages?

About 15 years ago, I took a couple wonderful adult education classes at the Newberry Library in Chicago about the works of Nikolai Gogol. The class was taught by a Ukrainian woman who, naturally, spent some time making the case that Gogol is a Ukrainian writer even though his greatest