“I'm done with magicians.”

I've come to think that Krzysztof Kieslowski has no sense of rhythm. It could be that this is something that happens to directors with age. If you're editing a movie, you probably need to have a lively sense of pace, and constantly bear in mind everything that has happened up to this particular moment of the film.

I noticed the same thing with Eyes Wide Shut—not that the movie was slow, but that it seemed to drag here and there, so that I had trouble following the point. “What's all this orgy mean? What now?” And so on.

As for La Double Vie de Véronique, it was a little like a chocolate box picture, pretty and vague, but it gave up on exploring the whole business of doubles and identities, as if there were way more attractive but pointless things to do along the way, and ...

“Hello, Uncle!”

“Ah, my niece. I'm getting old, hélas. I'm done with magicians and puppets and midgets. But you—you're not happy?”

“I'm in love. And I got a mysterious anonymous letter. And a mysterious shoelace!”

“That's good. You should probably have an affair with the expediter, no doubt.”

“I've always felt like I'm here and elsewhere at the same time.”

“Er, wow. No kidding.”

“Yet, when I was in Poland I apparently took a photograph of my Doppelgänger and didn't even notice her. My lips are moistly parted in bafflement.”

“Maybe if you'd stop wandering around giddily all the time with your dumb lips always parted in dumbness and dumblement and started paying a little attention—H'm!??”

I think I heard that Andrei Tarkovskii once ran into Kieslowski in a bar and started whaling on him, almost broke his spleen. “And stay the fuck away from half-lit mists and semi-reflecting surfaces, asshole!” he said.

Labels: Motion Pictures