Cat-and-mouse game of voyeur and victim, with an exchange of roles between the two about halfway through. Seems to have been well-received by the critics, but I found it too coy and contrived, not to mention compromised by a lack of credibility: The supposedly naive pure idealistic love of the voyeur, a 19 year-old boy, fails to acknowledge the inherent ugliness of voyeurism. Voyeurism entails a sinister imbalance of power between watcher and watched; it consists of cruelty and exploitation more than love; all of which the woman seemed to overlook much too easily. If the boy truly loved her, he would have stopped stalking her; his isn't love, but disease. The whole affair is intellectual structuralism at its worst, a plot concocted to demonstrate a point. Apparently, the woman spied upon "adulterates" the boy's love by humiliating him, as well as being unfaithful to her lover and unfaithful to love itself by her cynicism (thus violating the commandment, though unmarried). Her repentance and reversal seems as sudden and arbitrary as everything else in the film. Silly color coding abounds; the stranger in white (angel of death?) here carries a suitcase and shopping bag. The only intriguing element for me was the surrogate mother's sexual possessiveness, a tickle of evil.
Review of Dekalog, szesc
