Dekalog, dziewiec

An episod about its viewers. Doubts and generosity, fear and trust. And the impecable mannonesty. And about the structure of vulnerability. All - simple and clear and powerfull. er to show an ordinary story defining its basic traits. A husband and his wife. A good advice and a secret. The appearences. And the cold truth. But, more important, the right choice. The atmosphere is the lead pillar. Sure, each episode is defined but atmosphere but in this case , it represents the key for define attitudes, thoughts, gestures and decisions. A film about the roots of h

A knowledgeable film enthusiast will surely know the way in which infidelity is treated by some of the biggest names in European cinema. For a good example there is French Hitchcock Claude Chabrol whose films take pleasure in showing husbands brutally killing the lovers of their wives when they come to know of their wives' foolish infidelities.There is also Krzysztof Kieslowski,a Polish cinéaste who presents an East European vision of modern Polish society dealing with males and females cheating their respective partners."Dekalog: Dekalog,Dziewiec (#1.9)" turns out to be an outstanding infidelity film as it makes an honest attempt to link marital infidelity with confidence,trust and love which is needed by all couples in order to nurture and sustain their married lives.In this medium length feature Kieslowski asks a challenging question :can a bourgeois couple have reason to cheat each other if they have everything which they could wish for ? It is for the viewers to search for an answer which suits their intellectual level keeping in mind that nothing worthwhile can be said about a couple which is dishonest in spite of having no dearth of emotional richness.

Decalogue 9 - "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" is a story of the words misinterpreted, the important phone calls missed by a second. The loving couple has to deal with the serious problems that include the husband's impotence and the wife's infidelity. She loves her husband and does not want to leave him even after she learns the sad truth about his condition. She wants to end a strictly physical affair with a younger boyfriend. Her husband does not know that and the tragedy of errors just about to happen…

Decalogue 9 is also interesting because in it we first meet the main character of Kieslowski's later film, "Double Life of Veronique." Roman, the hero of Decalogue 9 is a heart surgeon and works in the hospital. One of his patients is a young, full of life girl who loves to sing and has a heart condition. Her favorite composers are Bach, Mozart, and Van den Budenmayer (a fictitious Dutch composer whose music is written by the regular Kieslowski's associate, Zbigniew Preisner).

9/10

To my way of thinking, what really makes this episode of "Dekalog 9" ("Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife") very singular is the fundamental importance ascribed to dialectics between sex and love applied to the theme of transgression and violation of the bond of conjugal fidelity. The drama of a married couple driven to despair and harassed by problems not easy to solve floats before our eyes in a disturbing way. The gravity of the situation cannot be underestimated, even if the two of them are still linked together by a close bond of affection.

Kieslowski doesn't show any scruples about following Hanka's and Roman's despairing thoughts in the course of their restless, toiling existence and carries out his purpose by a series of very frequent close ups, using long focal length zoom lens, enveloping the two characters in a sort of crude grazing lighting, showing up faces furrowed with wrinkles, placing their features in anything but a favorable light, casting a gloomy shadow over their future, almost prefiguring the uncertain life of the soul kept aside for them. He looks mercilessly into their pale and strained faces, revealing false pretenses mingled with an indefinite sense of guilt, ready to expose their congenital hypocrisy, to dismantle every misleading sense of security. Truly determined to penetrate the defensive shield erected around the married couple, Kieslowski finds out painful scars of time concealed into the folds of their skin worn away by perpetual stress in their marriage, violates the privacy of their facial features revealing all their disarming vulnerability, all their secret consistency of pure mirrors of souls double-crossing each other.

In this embarrassing situation where the impurity of deviating thoughts finds its barycenter in ill-concealed impulses of jealousy, a particular mention goes to the directorial use of the phone, invested with the task of unmasking every ambiguous situations and gratified with many meaningful close ups. Once again the director takes delight in evoking a suggestive game of mirrors in the successful attempt of rendering with great evidence the sense of estrangement and the ambiguous atmosphere of the story. He redoubles the nervous tension due to the dialectic game of two lonely souls with their nerves on the edge, with their barren make-believe opportunely unmasked for the benefit of the audience. Even if the doubtful transgression of the ninth commandment is perceived vaguely, the ninth episode of the "Dekalog" is one of the most significant of the whole series, full of inmost Bergmanian suggestions. And already one can perceive clear premonitory echoes of "The double life of Véronique" between the folds of this story.

This is one of the most potent Dekalogs for a while. The setup is one of those brilliant Kieslowski touches of sending us echoes that we're uncertain if from a hazy future or from inside the soul. He had plans to turn this into a third Short Film but gave up after exhaustion.

A husband discovers he's unable to have children, the doctor suggesting divorce, the end of his marriage. This is interlaid with shots of the wife back home looking for him in an empty apartment. There's a desolate sense between the two of them, something lost along the way and no one looked for it to put it back in. They lay on the same bed now, he has shared the news, and suggests she takes up an affair.

But is all of this, as in film noir, a dreamlike urge of pushing her away from him, or deep down wanting to? At the hospital where he works we get the sense that he's fascinated by a young patient who has a lovely voice but her heart might give way if she becomes a singer. She is content to not pursue this love.

So there is something, the Kieslowskian touch as I am discovering with these Dekalogs, of elusively inhabiting something that's been laying in wait and opens chasms in who these characters are. What we see may be what she's thought about before in a marriage that was draining itself away.

But then it slowly drains itself away. It sets itself up for formulaic surprises where now the boyfriend shows up where she went on a trip and he finds out and is heartbroken. We have what's by now a very typical tension in the series. If you have seen previous Dekalogs in a row, like I did, this will be slight by now.