Director of 'Red' Brings Epic 'Decalogue' to the MFA

The Decalogue, A Short Film About Love and A Short Film About Killing

directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski through April 22

schedule information: 369-3300 Tickets: Single film $6.50, $5.50 students, discounts for more than one.

The Bible has it all: sex, crime and moral crises. Krzysztof Kieslowski, one of the world's greatest filmmakers, realized the Good Book's potential and channeled it into "The Decalogue," a series of ten one-hour films, each based on one of the Ten Commandments. The result is stunning.

These ten tales of life in a Warsaw apartment building subtly illustrate the various conflicts that arise over each stricture. They are not literal descriptions of the ancient laws, which are rarely even mentioned in the films. Instead, Kieslowski probes beneath the surface of each commandment, unearthing a trove of questions. What is the nature of familial love? Is capital punishment another form of murder? Can man make his own Gods? Kieslowski's ten films bring the commandments under relentless scrutiny.

The first film in the series--centered upon the First Commandment, "I am the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other God but me," --is a haunting examination of faith. An atheistic father has a quasi-religious faith in technology, while his bright young son, Pavel, shows a precocious aptitude for computers. Pavel's mother is working abroad, and he is caught between his father's influence and that of his Catholic aunt. Although fascinated with computers, Pavel is still questioning; he hasn't made up his mind about God or the world. Opposing faiths in God and man-made science finally clash directly, with tragic results.

Adding a note of mystery, the film is punctuated with shots of an anonymous man who sits by a fire at the edge of the lake by Pavel's home. Wrapped in a tattered fur coat and wincing faintly, he looks as if he knows the cruelty of the world around him. Like the audience, he is a spectator, neither directly involved or affected. Is God just another spectator? Despite the final confrontation, the question of God's existence remains unresolved.

"Decalogue I" shows the results of man's trying to replace God with an atheistic faith in computers. In "Decalogue 2"--"Thou shall not take the name of the Lord in vain"--a man tries to step into God's shoes. A woman asks a doctor if her husband is dying. She is pregnant by another man and has never been able to have a child before--this may be her last chance. If her husband lives, she must give up the child. She loves her husband, she loves her lover and she also loves the unborn child (although she tries to chain-smoke it to death with her nervous habit). The doctor is forced to play the role of God, directing who will live and who will die. His own family history is juxtaposed with her story, according us unexpected insight. Kieslowski focusses on small images: the woman methodically snapping leaves off of a plant, her husband, in the hospital, fixating on a dripping pipe. The images wordlessly reflect the emotional states of the characters.

True to the spirit of the commandment, if not the letter, "Decalogue 4"--"Honor thy father and thy mother"--is a provocative look at incest. A motherless girl suspects that her father is not actually her father and draws him into a game of deceit to expose the unacknowledged desire that lies between them. But is he really not her father? And if he were her father, would that change the feelings that they have for each other? Forbidden desire clashes with the expectations that each family member holds to another. From the opening water-fight between father and daughter, relations are flirtatious and ambiguous. "Decalogue 4" approaches incest with the un-self-consciousness of an ordinary love story.

"Decalogue 5"--one of the best films in the series--was later expanded into "A Short Film About Killing," also playing at the MFA. A young lawyer defends a youth, Jacek, against a sentence of capital punishment for his brutal killing of a taxi driver. In the opening, the lawyer's words--"The law should not imitate nature, the law should improve it...For whom does the law avenge?"--emerge, disembodied, from a black screen. From the beginning, the emphasis is on the nature of justice. The film does not excuse the youth's crime; he is shown first strangling, then beating, the taxi driver to his death before sinking him in a pond. It is not his guilt that is in question; it is the hypocrisy of a system that purports to oppose killing, yet commits that very crime itself.

Cutting back and forth between the boy's story and his lawyer's arguments against capital punishment ("Since the days of Cain, no punishment has proven to be an adequate deterrent for murder."), the film culminates in Jacek's execution. The pandemonium surrounding the event belies the ideal of dispassionate justice. The mayhem in the execution room mirrors Jacek's struggle with his stubborn victim. It is not execution, but revenge, and the law denounces revenge.

More than the other films, "Decalogue 7"--"Thou shall not steal"--strikingly portrays how opposing figures can play the same roles. Majka bears a child at 16, which her mother claims as her own. Seven years later, Majka decides to steal her daughter back. The role of "thief" is a shared one. Majka may have reason for reclaiming the daughter who was stolen from her, but she is also stealing her daughter from the life that was familiar to her, and the people whom she had loved. Kieslowski turns his lens with equal acuity on each character, sparing no one and uncovering the same willingness to steal in each.

The filmic appeal of "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not commit adultery" is obvious; it is interesting to see what Kieslowski does with "Thou shalt not bear false witness." "Decalogue 8" is another prickly tangle of ethics. A young Jewish girl is to be temporarily adopted by a Christian couple during World War II. At the last minute, the couple changes their mind. They cannot bear false witness to the temporary "Christianization" of a Jewish girl, even by a priest, when they know that no real religious conversion has taken place. The woman who has arranged the adoption, who runs an underground operation to help Jews, turns the girl out: there is no help for her. The girl miraculously survives and years later she returns to Warsaw to confront the woman (now teaching a course on ethics at a university) who left her to an almost certain death. This film is not as marked by powerful images as the other films; it is dominated by the ethical struggle of the couple.

"The Decalogue" is not a Polish "After-School Special". Kieslowski isn't trying to enforce the "Thou shall"s and "Thou shall not"s of the Ten Commandments, nor are the commandments interpreted as "God's words." Their meanings and implications are poked and prodded at with the skillfulness of a surgeon, uncovering realities that run deeper than simple do-or-don't laws and laying them bare for judgment.

Kieslowski himself has said, "The goal is to capture what lies within us, but there's no way of doing it [with film]." Although he feels that literature is capable of describing more precisely our inner states, his dispassionate filmmaking, punctuated with haunting images and music, skillfully hints at his character's emotions.

Kieslowski brings up the evidence, and lets the viewer sort through it. By using ambiguous, evocative images he leaves more room for individual interpretation. Best of all, if you were swamped by Kieslowski's acclaimed (and also thematic) Three Colors series: "Blue," "White," and "Red," "The Decalogue" comes in more manageable one-hour bites that you can devour at leisure.