Friday, August 18, 2017

Kieslowski’s Dekalog: The Father of TV Miniseries

Poster of Dekalog Miniseries
Some thirty years ago, the great Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski decided to make a TV series based on or rather inspired by the Ten Commandments. About a week ago, we decided to watch it in its entirety. Thankfully, my wife was willing to give this series a try and remained my patient screen companion throughout all this artsy binge-watching. The issue with my wife, however, was less related to art movies but more with the subject and content manner, the series being, at least nominally, related to religion, which she, for better or worse, does not have a very positive relationship with.

If that is your only deterrent for staying away from this magnificent series, rest assured that it should not pose any impediment. Sure, the Vatican has applauded it but Kieslowski is not a religious fanatic, far from it. In fact, he is not didactic but presents us with moral dilemmas that will make us think about the subject matter. Yet in all of this, we, like his characters, appear to have free will to embrace and accept the ideas or not, and we are encouraged throughout to draw our own conclusions.  

In fact, the series is rather loosely based on the Ten Commandments. Most of the times, the Biblical connection highlights some of the issues raised in the given episode, but at other times the link seems a bit far-fetched. Yet throughout, there is one thing that can definitely be agreed upon: The whole series bristles with creativity and makes us reflect on these religious and spiritual matters. In fact, there is so much thought and reflection crystallized and condensed into each episode that one ought to follow the advice of film critic Roger Ebert and watch only one episode at a time, then spend the rest of the night discussing it with friends.

Almost all the episodes are filled with nostalgic and melancholic sentiments that are underscored with the beautiful haunting score by Kieslowski’s regular composer Zbiegniew Preisner, but the series opens on a decisively sad and tragic note. It is the first commandment of not having any gods before God. In this case, it is amplified to the human fallacy of trusting technology a little bit too much.

The series was shot some thirty years ago where computers were the exception not the norm, so it is interesting how Kieslowski foreshadows and predicts the advent of and dependence on technology. At one point, the professor alludes to Artificial Intelligence and claims that at some point in time it will have its own likes and dislikes and hence be more and more similar - if not equivalent - to human beings.

In the first episode, the computers are used not only to compute and offer predictions but they are also programmed to switch lights on and off and to turn on the water faucet. At a crucial point, the computer is used to calculate the thickness of ice and to decide whether it is safe to skate upon the nearby frozen lake. His ten-tear-old son Pawel wants to try out his new ice skates for the occasion.

His father is adamantly, one might say even blindly, embracing technology at the expense of any kind of spirituality. His sister, Pawel’s aunt, however, is pious and wants to inculcate religion into her nephew, which the father despite his personal beliefs does not object to. 

The boy himself is curious about life and death and has started asking difficult questions. What happens when we die, Pawel asks his father. What will remain of us? His father’s responses seem limited to the boy’s understanding of the world, whereas his aunt offers answers to soothe his inquisitive soul.

In the end, the calculations end up being wrong: the ice breaks and the boy drowns. The father rechecks his numbers and cannot understand how this could have happened. It can serve as a reminder that we cannot be certain of anything and that there is an indeterminate and mysterious variable in all our life’s undertakings. Call it a freak accident or spiritual white noise. But whatever it is, it is there and reminds us of our fragility. The Titanic was the beacon of human hope / hubris and it sank like a stone.

A second and, in my viewpoint, more disturbing interpretation could be that God is punishing us for our transgressions and for not adhering to the first commandment. In that sense, the father is chastised for embracing the false idol technology over God. In other words, it is God who has the last laugh.

But I do not think that is the way Kieslowski would want us to feel. My evidence would lie in the recurring character of the young man with the sad eyes. He shows up in almost all the episodes and especially at crucial moments of the tales. In the first one, he sits at a bonfire by the frozen lake, and he has eye contact with the father who carefully stomps upon the ice, testing his hypothesis.

The young man is not a Christ-like figure but more like a watchful angel, similar to the reflective angels in the brilliant film Wings of Desire. He watches humans but does not - or rather cannot - interfere in their decision-making. He is sad because he already knows the outcome, but the humans do not understand and cannot see the big picture or the full gamut and consequence of their actions. In the words of Christ, they do not know what they are doing.

As you can see, Kieslowski presents us a complex moral tale and it is never a matter of black and white. To give another example, let us take a look at the commandment of not killing. In this fifth episode, an irresponsible, careless and cruel young man kills a taxi driver for no discernible reason. Then the second half shows us the aftermath, he himself is facing death in the form of capital punishment.

Is an eye for an eye the appropriate response? By making the perpetrator so repugnant, one might think it so but then we see his own despair in front of impending doom. Is the government not engaging in another killing that is almost as cruel and heartless as the one committed by the criminal? The young lawyer of the film asks that question. Who is this capital punishment for? Is it to punish the criminal? Or to protect the innocent?

These are moral ambiguities presented in each of the episodes, and the answer is never easy. At times, the scenarios seem abstract and heavy-handed, especially in the case of the pregnant woman who is trying to decide whether to have an abortion or not. It all depends on whether her husband will die of cancer as he is not and cannot be the father of the child.

If her sterile husband survives, she will abort because the child is of the lover she has taken during his convalescence (!) and so she asks the doctor about her husband’s odds. The doctor is presented with an ethical dilemma. To his surprise and against medical odds, it turns out that the patient is, in fact, recovering. But if the doctor tells her that, she will go ahead with the abortion. But if he lies to her and claims that her husband is dying, she will not do so and the child will survive.

Yet despite its abstract framing, the episode is still filled with life and feeling. We wrestle with the doctor, our main protagonist, whether he should keep his oath by not using the Lord’s name in vain or whether he should deliberately lie to this woman; to make matters worse, she asks the doctor to swear that he is indeed telling the truth! In other words, here is a perfect example in which Kieslowski seems to side with actually breaking the commandment, that is, it is OK to use the Lord’s name in vain if it can save a baby’s life!

This situation is brought up again in the eighth episode, at least theoretically, as a moral dilemma: In a university classroom, the female professor believes that the doctor made the right choice in saving the child’s life over following the commandment. Ironically, the same professor has followed the commandment of NOT bearing false witness to her neighbor, which put the life of a young Jewish girl in danger! So she does not do as she preaches in class even though she ends up sticking to her commandment.

Or consider how Kieslowski deals with the commandment thou shalt not steal! In that episode, the young mother “steals” her own child! She was impregnated by her school teacher, so her mother decides to claim motherhood of her own granddaughter. Since the real mother, the young defiant girl Majka, is not allowed to live with her own child Ania, she decides to kidnap her daughter from her mother Ewa, the child’s grandmother.

In other words, this young woman Majka is stealing what (or rather who) is rightfully her own, but in this case the government does not recognize her as the official mother because the young girl Ania is registered under the name of her grandmother Ewa posing as her mother. The problem is Majka is quite irresponsible and emotionally unstable, while her mother Ewa would provide a safer home for the child Ania.

I could go on with the discussion of each episode but it would take up too much space here in merely one post. Each of the episodes is self-contained but it is the interconnectedness that makes them stand out as an integrated whole. Most of the characters live in the same housing project. At times, the paths of some of the characters cross. It is usually as a minor note, but it provides delight to the careful viewer.

For example, the doctor in one of the episodes happens to take the elevator with the characters of another episode. Or the recently departed father who does not appear in the final episode had a brief scene in Episode Eight, so we know what he looks like! The girl Ania also reappears in a brief shot in Episode Nine! These small scenes tend to underline the overall message of the whole series as an ambitious and monumental undertaking rarely seen on television up to then (we are talking pre-Twin Peaks era).


The strength of Kieslowski lies in presenting us abstract thoughts in concrete ways. We feel for and with the characters. We may not like them or may not agree with them; we may judge them or we may remain neutral, but be it as it may, Kieslowski presents us intimate and life-like stories of simple people. By magnifying the small and ordinary, he gives us a glimpse of the big picture: The workings of the universe with or without God in it. That interpretation is best left at the personal discretion of the viewer. 

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