At the risk of over-cooking the significance of the Fall, the synthesised, bricked-up, unforgivingly-lit landscapes of "Code: Selfish" could be the songs playing on the radio as the Poles drag Our Hero out of the car in the middle of a frozen mud-heap after his 'escape' from the West. Songs like "Birmingham School of Business School" and "Free Range" hint at exactly the tawdry horizons that surround the post-Cold-War figures with which Kieslowski populates his harsh, depthless world.
It's a bitter and relentless lesson; getting on and growing up are a direct function of reducing everybody else to the plasticised level of the manipulated. The story here generates its (chillingly plausible) momentum from a sequence of greedy land deals, in which ignorance, naivete, and lack of ambition are flushed down the u-bend of empty-eyed investment. There's an echo of all of this in the deals current in Spanish football at the moment: talented and promising youngsters are bought out from under their clubs by Real Madrid, not because Real have any use for them, but to prevent their rivals developing a player who might threaten their control of the means of televisual (re) production.
It's a minor miracle that we really care about the romance, because the plot and the characters give us no reason to.
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