Dekalog, dziewiec

Surgeon reacts to a diagnosis of impotence as if it were a terminal illness, urging his wife to take a lover and plunging into suicidal depression. His wife, however, is willing to live with the diagnosis and swears to a love above and beyond sex, which he rejects, at first; the movie is about his struggling with and final acceptance of this Platonic ideal. Jealousy leads him to spy on and covet his own wife, ergo the commandment. But this only humiliates him further. In a parallel, somewhat superfluous plot, a young female patient asks his advice about a risky operation which would enable her to sing, her life's dream. Both face the same dilemma of whether or not to accept a physical limitation which deprives them of their life's passion. Unlike him, the young woman is willing to live with her disease and forego singing. He changes her mind.

I thought the surgeon and the film, both, over-reacted to the diagnosis, assigned too much weight to it. The melodramatic lack of perspective makes the movie as moribund as its subject matter. Of course, it's amply color coded; the passing stranger in white rides by again; and, again, there's lapse of credibility: the surgeon shares a cigarette with the patient who is supposed to have a disease so debilitating as to prevent her from singing--this makes no sense. But, once again, K. knows how to make the final scene count, canceling earlier shortcomings, at least for a moment.

Overwrought arty soap opera.

By this stage of the series one is right to be more than a little weary and wary of having the same heart strings tugged on to play the same melancholy tune.

Eventually, this episode from the DEKALOG series will take on a life of its own. Beginning with a melodramatic premise-- a successful young doctor afflicted with irremediable impotence instructs his loving wife to take a lover-- Kieslowski constructs a 50 minute drama of extraordinary impact, the end of which is an affirmation of their marriage as a spiritual state these partners only half-perceive themselves. I called the film tragic above, but its arc parallels Shakespeare's late romance, THE WINTER'S TALE, right down to a near-miraculous conclusion. A lovely piece of work.

I notice that not too many people have commented on Decalogue Nine. I find this remarkable, but I think it might be because not too many people get this far in the series. From a writing standpoint, the best of the series are in the middle (I would say, maybe, 3, 5, and 6), but from a cinematic standpoint, Nine is the best. It predicts a lot of the trick film-making he would go on to do in Trois Couleurs: Bleu. Take note particularly of the shots through glass and the on the elevator in which the characters act in a scene somewhere between strobe light and slide show. All of this is not to say, however, that the writing or acting in this one are sub-par. In fact, the man who plays the doctor is remarkable and, like all of the films, there is a powerful ambiguity in which Kieslowski and Piesiewicz seem to, at once, take the commandments with a grain of salt and look upon them with the utmost seriousness.

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.

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