By Phil Christman
STAFF WRITER
“About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters; how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just / walking dully along,” writes Auden of Peter Breughel’s “Icarus.” By Auden’s measure, late Polish director Krzsyzstof Kieslowski was certainly an Old Master.
Best known for his “Trois Coleurs” trilogy, Kieslowski’s art was one of intimacy, small scale, his medium-range shots and close-ups subtly spotlighting the myriad connections among beleaguered humans. Five years after his death, American audiences are calling his “The Decalogue” (1988) a cinematic masterwork of “Godfather” or “Seventh Seal” magnitude.
Made for Polish television in the late 1980s and unreleased in America until this spring, “The Decalogue” is a series of ten one-hour films, each inspired by one of the Ten Commandments.
Relations between the commandments and their films are loose and associative, like the relations among the films themselves, which share characters and setting (a high-rise apartment building). The stories are narrow in scope, focusing usually on two or three people and a single situation—a father who worships technology vs. an aunt who believes in God; an ethics professor who meets the Jewish girl she refused to hide during World War II; two brothers who inherit a stamp collection worth millions. Kieslowski achieves his effects through a minute command of the short story format, with every detail right and every performance a miracle of tone and gesture. Like the God whose material he steals, Kieslowski is intimately involved in his creation; the eye of his camera seems to number every hair on the characters’ heads. And through a careful recurrence of characters and scenes - heroes of one film pop up as minor characters in someone else’s, “walking dully along” as the new heroes’ suffering takes place - he suggests that each of those hairs is important, inextricably bound to a network of lives and decisions that might well point to a Holy Other’s existence.
What does he do with the commandments? None of the stories ends with an easily extractable moral proposition; Kieslowski is more intent on the reasons why humans fail to live up to them. As he once remarked: “For 6,000 years, these rules have been unquestionably right. And yet we break them every day.” He tries to find out why, examining the ways in which notions of right behavior overlap and sometimes contradict.
Critics have suggested that the film is thus an apology for moral relativism; I submit that Kieslowski’s real contribution is precisely his ability to take us beyond such terms. Certainly the films, with their artful examinations of life’s connections and evil’s consequences, leave no room for the ethical black hole we all know lies in back of “relativism” as it is popularly construed; and surely they squash (through sheer verisimilitude) any dogmatic notions of Right Conduct that don’t allow for complexity or inner contradiction - which has become what people think we mean when we say “absolutist.”
Instead, Kieslowski presents folks caught in a net of loyalties, truths, and urges toward the sacred that they did not invent. Yet they are forced to make hard decisions and thus to “construct” (synthesize from preexisting but now contradictory intuitions, responsibilities and laws of behavior) values.
In other words, Kieslowski presents real life, a world where the commandments are “unquestionably right” and unquestionably hard to follow, even for a willing heart. In so doing, he moralizes the viewer without didacticism, teaching not what to think, but how to think about the characters—with the sympathy and care for their situations which he obviously had. Though he uses the commandments only as a frame, often an indistinct one (what does film eight have to do with bearing false witness?), “The Decalogue” is finally a pretty moral strip of celluloid. And one worth seeing.
|
