Video cassettes and DVDs are the paperbacks of cinema. Just as Penguin has been a ready supplier of literary classics, Blockbuster and the other video-rental outlets have become important purveyors of great movies and television — and thanks to them you might, on a Saturday night with nothing to do, come across a half-obscure gem like Decalogue, Kryztof Kieslowski’s set of ten short films about the Ten Commandments.
Last fall, Blockbuster started renting out copies of Decalogue at a significant number of its 5,000 stores nationwide. While newspapers bulged with articles in praise of HBO’s The Sopranos and Sex and the City, practically no one noticed as the Decalogue series slipped past customs. Of course, all ten films had been shown before in the United States, though only at somewhat less than populist venues such as the Lincoln Center film festival. Indeed, the series has been celebrated, by film critics anyway.
But critical acclaim, not critical mass, is all one could expect for ten movies, each an hour long, that debuted on Polish television in 1988. And though Kieslowski won some measure of fame with his tricolor series of films (Red, Blue, and White) in 1993 and 1994, his work has never been very accessible. Many of his storylines have translation difficulties that go well beyond subtitles. Consider the most successful film he made before Decalogue: the 1985 political ghost story No End. It is about a labor organizer, a dead lawyer, and the lawyer’s widow, who rightly suspects that her beloved husband is haunting her. Though one can find it on videotape, it’s never been popular, perhaps because to an American it sounds like a Demi Moore vehicle written by the AFL-CIO.
Politics plays an even greater role in the 1970s documentaries Kieslowski made after graduating from film school in Lodz (also the alma mater of Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski). Shooting documentaries was an excellent career choice, he believed. The Communist orthodoxy left a whole reality of people and things to be described for, it seemed, the first time. In Workers ’71, Kieslowski collaborated with several other directors and three different crews to make a huge political portrait of the working class that was to show how laborers’ own views differed from party propaganda. Unfortunately, during production, sound tapes were confiscated and Kieslowski was interrogated by the police. The film was never released.
Kieslowski’s documentary work led to his membership in a small but determined circle of filmmakers who referred to themselves as the Cinema of Moral Anxiety. Part professional claque, part school of thought, the group was united by the twin desires to honestly depict Poland’s fraying social fabric and to make life better for their countrymen. During these years Kieslowski made several politically outspoken films that were pretty much banned, except for small professional screenings that a large number of writers and artists tried to sneak into. It was in 1983, after Poland’s years of martial law, that Kieslowski directed No End, the heroic anti-Communist film that made his critical reputation abroad.
But it wasn’t until the late 1980s, when he exited politics entirely, that Kieslowski became a great filmmaker. This was of course the same period in which the democratic movement made its historic strides. Yet, in the movies of Kieslowski, Poland’s problems became secondary — and a serious moral vision took center stage.
Exactly what that moral vision is, however, has always been hard to pin down. In one interview, Kieslowski both described communism as evil and characterized belief in it as a mere intellectual mistake. Even while making movies that attacked the party, he claimed to feel a deep sympathy with the problems individual members faced. A mixture of humanitarian feeling and fatalism about anyone’s chances of doing good fills the ten films in Decalogue with both a sharply accusing moralism and a profound sense of human limitation.
Though most critics focus on the moral ambiguity of the ten parts, there could hardly be anything less ambiguous than devising ten stories around the Ten Commandments. And there is nothing whatsoever ambiguous in the story the first episode tells about the commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” A mathematician believes only in what can be measured and pays with his son’s life for ignoring God’s presence in the physical world. The lesson wouldn’t be any more blunt if it came with a six-foot priest to knock the wind out of you.
Bluntness is certainly not a fault of the second episode — which leaves you mystified about its illustration of the second commandment, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” A physician is visited by one of his neighbors, an acquaintance. The neighbor introduces herself and the physician says, oh yes, he remembers her. Didn’t she, the doctor asks calmly, run over his dog with her car last year? Thus opens a relation that is bound by grudge, need, and obligation. The neighbor reveals that she is pregnant, but not by her husband, who happens to be seriously ill. She wants the doctor to see her husband and surmise the man’s chances of survival. If he is going to live, she wants to abort the pregnancy. The doctor, however, has many reasons for hoping that the man will live and the child will be born.
Number ten (“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s”) tells the comic story of two estranged brothers — one a bourgeois, the other a singer in a punk band — who become passionate philatelists after jointly inheriting their father’s almost priceless stamp collection. Having resented their father all their lives for spending money on stamps while they as children went hungry, the brothers suddenly find there is almost nothing they won’t do to extend the collection. In the bargain, a piercing tale of a family torn by an unusual species of greed startles the viewer by becoming a first-rate caper.
The connective tissue of the ten stories is an enormous Soviet-style building complex. Huge, cold, and forbidding, it is teeming with these morality plays. The voyeur in number six can’t live very far from the mathematician in number one. Moral dilemmas bump into each other on the elevator. Greed is upstairs and down the hallway, so to speak, from adultery. Far from being a group portrait of exceptional people living in exceptional circumstances, this is a picture of everyman and everywoman in everyday circumstances.
For all that Kieslowski achieved in Decalogue, he was blase describing its conception. “It was cold,” he said in an interview. “It was raining. I’d lost my gloves. ‘Someone should make a film about the Ten Commandments,’ Piesiewicz [his writing partner] said to me. ‘You should do it.’ A terrible idea, of course.” In fact, one might describe the second half of Kieslowski’s career as a string of bad ideas that were made into exceptional movies. Take the woefully earnest ideas behind Kieslowski’s tricolor trilogy. Blue, White, and Red are based on liberty, equality, and fraternity, respectively. They sound like something a sophomore philosophy major might think up after pulling an all-nighter.
After watching Decalogue’s ingenious stories illustrate the sometimes exquisite difficulty of doing right and avoiding wrong, it is worth asking, What if Hollywood made a movie or a television series loosely based on the Ten Commandments? The women would surely be sexy enough to make coveting your neighbor’s wife understandable. Mom and Dad would be overbearing; the audience would have to know how hard it is to “Honor thy father and mother.” “Thou shalt not kill” would be observed in the breach as the muscle-bound action hero annihilated the bad guys. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” would probably be amended to “But make time for yourself.” Of course, you can get those movies at Blockbuster, too.
David Skinner is an associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
