Dekalog, osiem

Like "Dekalog, jedem", it is one of the most powerful episode of the serie for me. The admirable performance of Maria Koscialkowska, the beautiful work of Teresa Marczewska as Elzbieta , reminding the performance of Krystyna Janda in "Dekalog ,dwa" are the lead virtues. The reference to the dilemma of Dorota Geller is, for same reason, a significant clue. In same measure, it is an episode about Shoah and its shadows, about fear and about resurrection of past price. About a decision and its profound, hidden roots. About the expected word. A special film. For the exploration of the memories of the viewer.

A young Jewish woman, who felt she was wronged as a child, seeks out the elderly woman whom she felt betrayed her. This woman has lived with her decisions most of her life, knowing that what she did was necessary but seemingly cruel. This film is a masterpiece of subtlety and real human feeling. At no time is there rage or overt anger, only an effort to get questions answered. The thing that stands out is the theme that we can't change the past; that time mutes everything. The crooked painting and the contortionist are striking symbols of changes and corrections being hard, if not impossible. I really liked this one.

This is not a particularly remarkable Dekalog. But it's simple and lays out as clearly as any of them the blueprint that Kieslowski worked towards, both in these 10 Dekalogs, the longer short films, and it remains to be seen I guess if he perfects and evolves this for the color trilogy.

The twofold blueprint is that we have a world and a story that takes place. The world across the 10 Dekalogs is the same few months in the life of an apartment block, ostensibly the same few months the show aired. Here for example we have the story of Dekalog 2 with the dying husband laid through as something that happened in the same neighborhood.

Anyway this world is open-ended and ebbs forward and back with what the protagonists have set in motion around them. The most interesting thing about Dekalog is Kieslowski's ability, snippets of it in TV form, to render that visually as movements in emotional air.

The story each time focuses on a moral issue, here it's guilt, tied to the Polish experience of WWII and how it reverberates still. But time and again the story is reduced to two characters forlornly baring themselves to each other in a room, explaining or avoiding to. Bergman.

Here we have it clearly: the notion (during a class on ethics) of stories where readers (viewers) have to surmise the motivation of characters.

One of these viewers inside the class begins narrating her own story that begs for ethical interpretation: a Jewish girl in need of shelter from Nazi horror who was turned away from a Catholic Polish home.

Kieslowski attempts to visually inhabit a corner of this story (no more is allowed by the TV format): the old woman returns to the same WWII home where the story took place, the girl is lost and she looks for her distraught. She was the protagonist in that story, now inhabiting the memory of it.

Then we are back in a room where we have a deeper story that explains the former, giving us a plausible ethics that explain what seemed like wrongdoing at the time. This is the same Dekalog effort of setting up a story that they try to deepen later on with more complicated morals.

The idea is that we leave these Dekalogs with some insight into the destructiveness of what it means to inhabit a story (the Jewish girl carried that story of wrongdoing with her for 40 years) as well as some measure of realization about the complexity of inter-dependence forces at work behind the stories.

But this is too clear, a template on how to write rather than a poem.

Dekalog 8 introduces a debate about a situation described in the second episode of the series, with regard to some interesting researches about thematic morals made in an unadorned lecture hall. As in a game of mirrors, Kieslowski's magical poetry proposes subtle allusions, references, previous solutions analysed under different points of view.

The analysis of Elzbieta's personal story framed within the context of her restless past and recalled in the light of her present time made of painful and unavoidable confrontations proposes the harassing thought about our duty to God, about our moral obligations towards the Christian commandment, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour". Is it possible to be merciful to our fellowmen even at the risk of violating the dictates of divine commandments? Are we allowed to help people even if we are aware about the incompatibility between the ethical principles applied to the evidences of religion and the intention of "bearing false witness against our neighbour" to a good purpose? Is it really possible to give up the idea of getting out of the clutches of the Nazi police a six-year-old Jewish child in the desperate need of a certificate of baptism only on account of moral and religious scruples? The dramatic explanation between Elzbieta, haunted by the memories of her unhappy childhood, and Zofia, the elder woman who refused to give her a passport to safety many years ago, call to our minds a sense of bewilderment and affliction.

Both of them are afraid of something going up in smoke around them and nothing escapes their remembrances of a painful past. Sad remembrances of course, because nothing hurts like the truth. Crude in the same manner as a vivisection of the soul. Conjured up with surgical precision in the coldness of an utterly impersonal ambient. Maybe only a cathartic face to face between the two women would give life to new friendly relations made of comprehension, explanations, reconciliations. Kieslowski divides all humanity into two parts: the saviors and the saved. His strict dialectics traces all the uneven steps of the story in a very subtle way. He likes to give back to human dignity its state of primitive and natural innocence, deeply upset by a pressing sense of misinterpreted obedience to the precepts of the Church.

"Thou shalt not bear false witness" is the commandment in question being addressed by director Kieslowski. The anti-Jewish sentiment is merely a vehicle to study the Christian commandment threadbare. Is the concept of Christian charity second to a commandment? The film is ambiguous about the director/writer's view on this yet we suspect the director is not taking a clear stand. He does take a stand on the God within each of us--the goodness, the humane aspect of each of us is the last word.

This film is one of the few in which we seem to get a peek at the real Kieslowski. The initial parts of the film keep religion out of focus and in the background. The church/shrine at Leobowski is initially never shown in focus--you only see the lighted candles before an altar/shrine. Later in the film the Jewish girl is seen praying at the Christian site (an act confirmed later in the film through the dialogue).

The film begins with reproach of one wronged at age 6 by a "religious" Catholic who refuses to be charitable out of fear of repercussions, hiding behind the Commandment. The film ends with the main characters coming closer in a new bonding through understanding through re-evaluation of new facts and a theological reconciliation. Momentarily, even the viewer is made to suspect the Catholic woman's credibility as she presents her case to the grown-up "child". But the "wronged" child undergoes a transformation--she begins to like the woman who did not bear witness, a lonely woman whose son has left her, a remorseful woman teaching ethics.

The brilliant culmination of the film is the final presentation of the tailor's character--the man, a Christian, who was ready to save a Jewish child--who knowing everything refuses to discuss the past, present and future--a man who has evidently faced a lot of torment. He watches dispassionately the bonding between the two women as the film ends.

The elder woman anticipates the reaction of the tailor and waits outside the shop. The woman who straightens the stubborn painting that refuses to align, the woman who has lost her biological son in society, gains the understanding of the child she wronged. The goodness in man comes out in this episode of Dekalog, sometimes silently (the tailor), sometimes evocatively (the Jewish girl who prays alone after reconciling with religions and finding a different woman in the person she thought was different and inhuman).

The camera-work is not as good as in Dekalog 7, but the all performances and the minimalist music are just stunning.

However, there are questions left unanswered. What was the interruption in the classroom all about? Why was the opening scene of the child of 6 being led by an adult necessary? Why did the tailor not talk after recognizing her? Are there political metaphors here? I had the good fortune of meeting the Director 8 years before he made this film. How I wish I had met him now!