“Heaven” - Tom Tykwer (2002)

Heaven (2002) is a romantic thriller that fascinatingly features the combined virtues of its two talented creators, Tom Tykwer and Krzysztof Kieslowski.  Film director Tykwer presents this tale with the visually kinetic flare one would expect on the basis of his earlier work (Winter Sleepers (1997), and Run Lola, Run (1998)). But it is Kieslowski’s story/screenplay (co-written with his usual coauthor, Krzysztof Piesiewicz) that makes this film stand out from other thrillers and raises it to another level.  Kieslowski had intended this to be the first part of a trilogy, whose other two parts were to be Hell and Purgatory, but his death in 1996 prevented him from completing that project.

On the surface, the story may seem to be simple and outlandish. A woman seeking revenge for  her husband’s death by drug overdose attempts to assassinate the drug kingpin behind her husband’s addiction.  However, her assassination attempt goes awry and leads to the deaths of four innocent people instead of her intended victim.   She is immediately arrested and confesses to her crime.  But while she is testifying to the police in custody, a low-level police officer becomes enamored of the woman and tries to whisk her away to safety.  Most of the film is devoted to his lone efforts, in the face of impossible odds, to somehow rescue this women from the punishment  that seems to be inescapable. 

Just looking at the plot on that level, the story may seem preposterous and morally questionable.  Why should we be interested in helping a confessed murderer escape facing the consequences of her act?  Indeed film critic Roger Ebert questioned the morality of the story for this reason [1].  But if you are familiar with Kieslowski, you know that he sees human engagement in all its inscrutable and multifaceted complexity.  In his acclaimed ten-part television series, Dekalog (1989), Kieslowski had earlier explored the range of the Bible’s Ten Commandments and the extent to which it is ultimately impossible to formulate a fully structured logical framework for moral and ethical behaviour [2].  What is invariably needed to complete the picture is an injection of the mysterious powers of love and compassion. This territory is explored further here in Heaven’s fantasy-tinged theatrics.

In fact there are several themes explored in Heaven.  Morality is one of them, but it is overshadowed by two other themes:

• the nature of love and compassion
• the contingent nature of existence: the degree to which chance governs our existence and the consequent extent to which we are to be held responsible.

At the outset of the film, an Italian police officer, later identified as Filippo (played by Giovanni Ribisi), is being given helicopter pilot training by means of a flight simulator.  At the end of the training session Filippo elevates the simulated helicopter upwards indefinitely, at which his instructor remarks, “in a real helicopter you can’t just keep flying higher.”  Filippo then asks, “how high can I fly?”  Indeed, that is the question concerning contingency that will be put to the test.

Then the film turns to the assassin, Philippa (Cate Blanchett), and her attempt to set a time bomb in a high-rise office building that is intended to kill a corporate executive, Mr.Vendice,  who she knows is a  clandestine drug overlord.  It is all carefully planned; but happenstance intervenes, and the bomb is accidentally moved so that when it detonates, it kills four innocent people and not Mr. Vendice. 

Philippa had been trying to get the Carabinieri, the Italian national police, to take action against Mr. Vendice and had identified herself to the police force on numerous occasions.  What she did not know was that the police had corrupt elements who were in on Vendice’s drug trade. These people had suppressed her revelations and when the bomb wet off, they knew who was responsible and immediately had Philippa arrested.  It is only at this point, eleven minutes into the film that the film titles appear.

Although Philippa is clearly guilty of the killing, she is brought to the prosecutor at the Carabinieri headquarters to make her own statement, and she uses the opportunity to reveal, once again, what she knows about Mr. Vendice.  Since Philippa is English (she works in Italy as an English teacher), she wants to testify in English.  So Filippo, a young police clerk in attendance who knows English, is recruited to be her translator. What none of them realize is that also in attendance at her testimony is Major Pini (Mattia Sbragia), who is in on the drug corruption and wants to see Philippa and her “evidence” eradicated.

While testifying to the prosecutor, Philippa is overcome with horror of her crime and faints to the floor.  Filippo bends down to attend to her, and when he looks into her eyes and holds her hand, he falls in love with her.  Philippa is unaware of this event, but from here on, Filippo is quietly but unreservedly in love.

Filippo is now faced with an apparently hopeless task: to save his beloved who is imprisoned  for a confessed heinous crime.  The rest of the film covers his efforts, which are divided up into five “operations” – we can call them ops, stratagems, gambits, capers, maneuvers, whatever – I will call them “ops”.  Each of the ops faces impossible odds against success and relies on fortuitous circumstances to come out just right.  In fact the infinitesimal likelihood of success for each successive op seems to decrease as we move forward in the story.  But love, not practicality, is the driver in this tale. Here, too, there is improbability, but as the story unfolds, the viewer is drawn into the relentless train of unlikely contingency that drives the action..

Op 1
First, Filippo needs to communicate surreptitiously with Philippa.  Through an extraordinarily contrived electrical accident, he sneaks a small tape recorder into Philippa’s pocket during one of her testimony sessions.  When she listens to the tape back in her cell, she learns of his plan and records her willingness to proceed.  However, the chances of Filippo’s plan succeeding take a devastating hit when we learn that the Carabinieri secretly record everything that goes on in Philippa’s cell; so they know all about Filippo’s intentions.

Op 2

Filippo has a plan to sneak Philippa up into the unused attic of the police station.  This caper is even more outlandish and unlikely, but it is successful.  In the evening when Filippo goes to join Philippa in the attic, she tells him that the only reason she is cooperating with Filippo is to see if she can have one more opportunity to murder the drug operator Vendice. 

Op 3
Filippo’s love for Philippa is without reservations, and he is totally committed to helping her, despite her apparent dismissal of lawful solutions to her frustrations.  In that evening he sneaks her into the office of the corrupt Carabinieri Major Pini and then, pretending to be a Pini assistant, manages to convince Vendice to rush over to the office that very night.  Again there are lucky circumstances, but everything breaks in Filippo’s way, and Philippa does kill Vendice. 

Op 4
After spending the night in the police headquarters attic, they still have to figure out a way to escape from the building, which is full of police looking for the two missing fugitives.  Early in the morning they sneak down to the garage and jump into the back of a milk delivery truck that is making its rounds.  The fact that they could find a spot behind some milk cartons to hide is something that Filippo is unlikely to have foreseen.  When the milk truck, still making its rounds, passes near the train station, the two fugitives jump out the back and get onto a train headed for the Italian countryside, where one of Philippa’s good friends lives.

Op 5
In the small picturesque town of Montepulciano, they are less likely to be identified, and things are more relaxed.  Philippa and Filippo enter a church, and while sitting in the pews, Philippa “confesses” to Filippo about all the past wrongs she has committed in her life.  She tells him that she has “ceased to believe’.When Filippo asks her in what she has ceased to believe, she tells him, “sense, justice, life, . . .”.  This is a real Kieslowski moment. It is at this point that he tells her that he loves her.  He does not want to possess her; he wants to become “one” with her, and this metaphorical union is progressing by degrees.  Their names are similar, their clothes are similar, and in order to lessen the likelihood of identification, they go to a barber and get their heads shaved. So now they look very similar, too.

Filippo’s father (Remo Girone), who is a senior policeman and sympathetic to his son’s plight, arrives in the town and tells them there is now a massive manhunt throughout Italy in search of them.  He offers to help them return to society, but Filippo and Philippa swear by their now mutually-confessed love and say they will struggle on alone.

Filippo and Philippa make it to their sympathetic friend’s countryside home, and that evening in the beautiful countryside surroundings, they consummate their love.  This is movingly presented by Tykwer in three successive long shots (roughly 30 seconds each) showing the two of them reveling in nature's wonders and each other.

In the morning a massive and heavily armed Carabinieri SWAT team arrives.  This leads to the final and most improbable escape yet.  They sneak onto a momentarily unattended Carabinieri helicopter and take off as the film ends.

We never know what happens to the two protagonists, so the adventure story, as well as the morality tale, are incomplete.  But the love story has reached its dramatic fulfillment.  And love is ultimately what the film is about. 

The production values of Heaven are of a high order.  In particular Tykwer’s camera work, editing, and narrative pacing are all superb.  Also excellent is the acting – especially that of Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, and Remo Girone.  They manage to make what is essentially a fantasy seem real.

However, the moral side of this tale, to the frustration of some viewers, is set aside for the consideration of more personal and existential concerns. The probabilistic unreality of some of the film’s sequences make one wonder about the degree to which life is governed by chance or by some higher authorities. This consideration is enhanced by Tykwer’s occasional downward-looking aerial shots, suggesting a perspective outside the scope of the human participants.  And love seems to be part of this equation.

In fact the eternal mystery and magic of love come to life in this film as it unfolds.  How could Filippo love Philippa so suddenly? Moreover, Filippo is seven years younger than Philippa, and both his natural reticence and the constraining circumstances give him no opportunity to show himself to her.   How could she come to love him?   It is the artistry of the contributors to this film that make it come to life and help us see that love is just as much a driver of this world’s experiences and truths as nature’s mechanics.

★★★★

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “Heaven”, RogerEbert.com (18 October 2002).    
2. Episodes 5, 6, and 8 in that 10-part series relate most closely to the moral issues covered in Heaven.

Dekalog 10: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.”

The final episode of Kieslowski’s brilliant Dekalog series, Dekalog 10: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.”, is a departure from the general tone and style of the rest of the series. This one is more cynical, almost comic, compared to the others, and there is, for once, an outward-looking glance at the degeneracy of contemporary Polish society at the time. The overall picture of the world is one that is less civilized, less polished, and there are fatalistic overtones to this story, perhaps influenced by the participation of cinematographer Jacek Blawut, who had also photographed the tragedy-laden Dekalog 1: “I am the Lord, thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” Maybe for this reason the compassionate witness, played by Artur Barcis, who is silently observed in all the other episodes, makes no appearance here.

The story concerns two adult brothers, both of whom are tired of their own perpetually penurious financial circumstances. The older brother, Jerzy, is a possibly out-of-work, lower middle-class family man, and the younger one, Artur, is a semi-destitute punk-rock singer of a group called, “City Dead”. They learn that their reclusive father, with whom they had both been out of contact for years, has just died, and they must attend his funeral and wind up his affairs. In fact the two brothers, whose lifestyles are so different, have, themselves, been out of touch for years, and their father’s death is a chance for them to catch up with each other.

Their father had been an obsessive stamp collector, and when the brothers go to clean out their father’s dingy one-room apartment, they begin to wonder if the extensive stamp collection is worth quite a bit of money. They consult a former philatelist colleague of their father’s, who informs them that the collection might be worth something like a hundred thousand dollars. This shocking and lust-inspiring revelation leads the two brothers down a slippery slope of greed, paranoia, and ultimately mutual mistrust. They try to interact with stamp traders and some of the other former associates of their father, who had famously been known as “Root” in the philately community, to see how they might convert the collection into cash, and they begin to learn why their own father had become so reclusive and suspicious of others: everyone they meet is trying to cheat them out of their potential fortune. Yet it seems that there are no other avenues for them to pursue. They will have to make deals with these shady characters.

Although Jerzy and Artur also become suspicious and conniving, there is evidence from the outset that they are both in over their heads on this venture. This is well-conveyed by the acting performances, which depict the amateurish body language displayed by Jerzy and Artur in the face of their mild-mannered, but ultimately far more sinister, adversaries. As the story evolves through the various ups and downs that the hapless brothers experience in their quest to become rich, it becomes something of a metaphor for the pervasive corruption and loss of faith prevalent in Poland in the dying days of the Communist dictatorship. Artur’s ludicrously over-the-top punk rock lyrics are exemplary. These supposedly anthems of contemporary youthful yearnings represent pure trash-talk: advocating greed, plunder, and self-satisfaction at the expense of all others. Even he doesn’t believe the message of these lyrics, yet young women admire him for them, just the same.

There is also the general issue of what has real value. The stamps are just old pieces of paper that have no intrinsic utility. They only have worth if others in the trading game believe that they can be sold onward to other traders. The two brothers have no idea how this trading game works and no hope of winning at it, especially when there is widespread collusion, cheating, and criminal activity embedded in its very core.

Some reviewers have found this film to be extremely funny and ultimately a clever warning against the greed displayed by Jerzy and Artur, but I don’t see it that way. Greed does triumph in this one, it’s just not the more amateurishly greedy Jerzy and Artur who benefit. The tougher, greedier ones do. But in the end, perhaps the two brothers come to an understanding and comradeship that is worth more than anything money can buy.
★★★½ 

Dekalog 9: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”

The ninth episode of Kieslowski’s Dekalog, Dekalog 9: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” is one of the best in the series. It is about marital infidelity, which one might have expected to have been the subject of episode 6 (Dekalog 6: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”), but was not. In this story Roman, a successful, thirty-something heart surgeon, visits a colleague friend and learns that his own sexual dysfunction problems are permanent and incurable. He has a beautiful wife, Hanka, and now must come to terms with how, or whether, he is going to live the rest of his life with her.

Roman returns to his wife and hesitantly, but stoically, tells her the grim news. He dolefully offers to do the honorable thing: if she chooses to stay with him, she can start seeing other men. Hanka swears by her love for Roman, but finds the conversation about sex a bit too explicit -- love for her is more than just those kinds of physical aspects.

Nevertheless Roman’s new feelings of inadequacy start eating away at him. He begins to watch his wife’s habits a bit more than he used to. He notices an unusual notebook belonging to some physics student in the glove compartment of his car. He constructs an electronic device to secretly tap his wife’s phone conversations. And finally, he makes copies of the keys to his mother-in-law’s apartment, which is currently vacant while his mother-in-law is away. He suspects that his wife is having trysts with the physics graduate student there.

After awhile all of Romans’ jealous suspicions are confirmed. His wife has a lover, and this has been going on for some time, even before his medical problems. The physics student lover, Mariusz, is shown to be seriously in love with Hanka. But Hanka is now overcome with feelings of concern for her troubled husband and feeling guilty about the affair.

Hanka’s moral crisis concerns how she should manage her love life and how honest she should be with her husband about what has happened. Roman’s crisis concerns his self-image as a man. He wants to avoid being jealous about something that he cannot provide for his wife, but at the same time he cannot hold himself back from finding out the horrible details.

There is a side story in the film that reflects on Roman’s situation. A young patient, Ola, is faced with a potentially risky operation to rectify a heart condition. If she doesn’t have the operation, she will have to abandon her promising career as a classical singer. She asks Dr. Roman what she should do, and he tells her that these operations are usually only performed as a last resort. She nods and says that she only wants to live, not risk death just to acquire fame as an opera singer. Roman then ruefully reflects on the value of a diminished life that cannot reach fulfilment. (Later on in the story, Ola is talked into going ahead with the operation, but, she says thoughtfully to Roman, she will then become “someone else”)

Hanka does break off her affair with Mariusz, but it’s a little late: Roman has spied on her and knows everything. He is shattered by the explicitness of what he sees, and his feelings of hopelessness and oblivion generate thoughts of suicide.

When Hanka faces up to everything and tries to reconcile with Roman, she humbly begs forgiveness and agrees that they should go ahead and adopt a child (thereby affirming concretely that their marriage is forever). At this point, we might expect that the story has reached its dramatic conclusion, but not quite.

Roman, not surprisingly, has not really recovered from his moribund thoughts and insists that they need some time apart in order for him to regain himself. Hanka suggests that he might travel somewhere, but Roman says that he cannot bear to be away and think about leaving his wife alone in the same town with “that physicist”, so it is agreed that Hanka will go on a ski holiday. It turns out, however, that Mariusz, “that physicist”, hasn’t given up on his relationship with Hanka and heads out to the same ski resort to meet her. And Roman’s suicidal thoughts haven’t disappeared, either. This leads to a dramatic conclusion of the film that is one of the most moving in the Dekalog series.

A further comment is in order concerning the camera work of Piotr Sobocinski in this film. It is masterfully carried out with all sorts of inventive and evocative shots that highlight the dramatic elements of the storytelling. This is one of the key features that make this episode stand out.
★★★★

Dekalog 8: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

This episode, Dekalog 8: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.", of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog series squarely addresses the commandment concerning bearing false witness. But like many of the installments of the series, it raises the issue of the relative priorities of moral precepts. This issue was raised most directly in Dekalog 2: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”, and, in fact, that earlier story is explicitly referenced in this episode for comparative purposes.

In this story Zofia is a well-known professor of ethics at the university in Warsaw, and in her large lecture class she challenges her students with moral questions. She lives alone, engages in daily exercises and jogging, chats with other elderly neighbors in the apartment complex, and, all in all, has a well-laid-out and tidy existence. One day, she is visited by an American scholar, Elzbieta, who has previously translated some of Zofia's works into English and who has come to Poland to research those who survived the Jewish Holocaust. Elzbieta asks to attend one of Zofia’s ethic lectures and listens while Zofia asks her students to pose moral dilemmas. One student discusses the moral situation that was presented in Dekalog 2. In that story, a woman queries a doctor whether her seriously ill husband will live or not. If the doctor thinks the husband will live, then the woman will abort her pregnancy that is the result of an affair with a paramour. The doctor realizes that his response has life-or-death consequences. Zofia, who knows that the student drew this example from the “real-life” incident in her apartment complex, points out that in the actual case, the most important result eventuated: the unborn child lived.

Upon hearing Zofia’s response, Elzbieta asks if she can tell another “real-life” story. It concerns a six-year-old Jewish girl who was to be harbored outside the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 by a Catholic couple who were to swear that the girl was Catholic. The child was taken to the home of the would-be foster parents, but at the last minute, the Catholic couple balked, saying that, as good Catholics, they could not commit the sin of lying. In this instance, the child was turned away to face an almost certain death.

Zofia is shaken by this story, and we soon learn why. Elzbieta was that same Jewish child back in 1943 who was turned away, and Zofia, herself, was the young woman who made the moral claim about lying and denied shelter to the child. More than forty years have passed, and it is only now that Zofia learns that the child that she had turned away did indeed survive. So, in fact, Elzbieta has come to accuse Zofia of a moral crime: for the sake of a petty concern about a small lie, Zofia had essentially condemned a young girl to death. This is quite the opposite moral concern that Zofia had just expressed in her classroom – that the saving of a life was paramount.

Could Zofia, who seems like such a benevolent and well-balanced person, have been so heartless forty years earlier? As the two women discuss what happened on that occasion long ago, it is revealed that Zofia did have some moral grounds for doing what she did. She and her husband were working for the underground resistance movement at that time and acted as they did, not simply to avoid lying, but to protect others in the underground.

So, at this point, there is evidence given that seems to provide a full justification of Zofia’s behaviour of that earlier period. Nevertheless, Zofia acknowledges that the decision that she made then was not the correct one. She now accepts that the life of that young child was more important than anything else.

As the two women further discuss their own feelings about morality and what is important, Zofia’s rather sophisticated and enlightened perspective concerning moral action in an immoral universe is revealed. Surprisingly, it turns out that Elzbieta is the truly religious one, and Zofia is not – Zofia doesn’t attend church. Elzbieta initially accused Zofia of being too rigidly attached to moral dogma (by refusing to bear false witness of any kind, even when lives are at stake), but we now see that it is Elzbieta who is the more rigidly moralistic person. In the end, Elzbieta comes to appreciate Zofia’s more humanistic perspective and is mollified. Zofia, in turn, has been able to see how she, herself, has grown from the idealistic person that she had been forty years earlier. Both women have benefited from this encounter and widened their perspectives.

So the principal moral issue in this story is not so much about the priority or importance of the literal truth and more about the relative moral importance of two kinds of actions: a concrete action that would save a single life in the concrete instance versus a political action that might have the probability of saving many more lives. Despite the interesting nature of this moral quandary and the connections with “Dekalog 2", however, the film is diminished by three weaknesses:

• Cinematography. There are extensive hand-held tracking shots of Zofia in closeup that are not smoothly accomplished. Many of the shots, which include pointless zooms and camera movements that almost stalk the characters,, are artificial and not well motivated. Kieslowsky used different cinematographers for most of the episodes in the series, and this has the poorest cinematic execution. Contrast the cinematography here with the superb cinematic realization of the next episode, Dekalog 9: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”.
• The dynamics of the narrative are weakened by its dependence on Elzbieta’s verbal account of the events that had happened forty years earlier. These dramatic events are merely recited in the lecture theatre rather than given visual portrayal.
• The key personal interaction, the theatrical chemistry, between Maria Koscialkowska, as Zofia, and Teresa Marczewska, as Elzbieta, is not sufficiently gripping to hold the audience.

Nevertheless Zofia’s confession to Elzbieta still resonatess: “You are right; no ideal is worth more than the life of a child.”
★★★½ 

Dekalog 7: “Thou shalt not steal.”

The seventh episode of Kieslowski’s Dekalog, Dekalog 7: “Thou shalt not steal.”, opens with the sounds of a child’s nightmare-fueled cries from the apartment complex that is the home of the series. These cries offer the clue that this film will not only be about theft, but will also be about the essentiality of a mother’s love. Ania, the crying child, is a six-year-old girl living in a family that includes Stefan, a retired musical instrument maker, his wife, Ewa, the headmistress of a school, and their 22-year-old daughter, Majka, who has just been expelled from the university.

It is evident from the outset that Majka has a tortured relationship with her mother, and it takes some time for the details concerning this family relationship to emerge. Although ostensibly Ania is the daughter of Ewa, it is later revealed that the biological mother is Majka, who gave birth to Ania when she was only sixteen as a result of a clandestine affair with one of her teachers at Ewa’s school. Since Majka was underage, the family arranged for a coverup to keep up appearances. Majka’s mother was announced as Ania’s mother, and falsified medical records certified the legality of that status. Now, six-years-later, Majka wants to reclaim her real daughter, and she intends to do it by kidnaping her. But, Majka asks, “can you steal something that’s yours?”

Majka does manage to spirit Ania away when she is attending a school function and heads off to hook up with Ania’s father, Wojtek, who had apparently been forced out of a teaching job by Majka’s mother six years earlier and now lives in a remote rural house, eking out a living as a toy-maker. Majka apparently wants to run away to Canada with Wojtek and the child, but the first meeting in six years between the two former lovers is not as warm as Majka had hoped. Fearing that Wojtek will betray her to the authorities, Majka flees his cottage, too. She calls her mother and gives her an ultimatum: either give legal permission for her to take Ania with her to Canada, or she will kill herself and Ania, too. The chilling telephone conversation between mother and daughter reveals the depths of contempt that they feel for each other.

This Dekalog episode has more action, more of a conventional plot, than most of others. It is the story of a mother kidnaping her own child from the grandparents and trying to make an escape. These events include a getaway, a desperate search for the fugitives, death threats, and chance encounters – all the conventional ingredients of an adventure. But despite the fact that the plot of this episode has these adventurous elements, there is a narrative weakness, too. Too much backstory information has to be revealed by explanatory conversations. These take place during dialogues between Stefan and Ewa and between Majka and Wojtek. As a consequence, much crucial information is revealed by textual exposition, rather than by visual experience. On the other hand, the acting in the film is exceptional, even by Kieslowski’s high standards. All of the players give outstanding performances, but perhaps the most amazing of all is the resonating performance of the child actress, Katarzyna Piwowarczyk, as Ania. But, as with the other Kieslowski efforts, it is not adventure that lies at the heart of the story. The real story in this episode is about Majka and her search for motherhood.

From the very first images, when Majka is seen returning her damaged textbooks to the university office, it is evident that Majka is a person with no self-confidence. She is plain, untalented, and overlooked by everyone. Her mother, Ewa, by contrast, is self-confident, charming, and imperious. Ewa is used to giving orders and manipulating people to get her own way. When she gave birth to Majka, we are told, she learned that she could never have another child, and so she never forgave her daughter for causing this deficiency. Majka’s father, Stefan, is a kindly, but ineffectual, parent – unable to match or counter Ewa’s domineering ways.

So it appears that Majka grew up seeing herself as a loser, unloved and unwanted. Her expulsion from college was undoubtedly just one more event in a long story of failure. In the end, she felt that perhaps Ania was the one person who might love her. After all, Majka is Ania’s natural mother – she has to love Majka. For Majka this was the opportunity to give Ania the kind of mother’s love that she, herself, never received. In this story it was Majka who was the unloved child that needed a mother’s love.

This film suggest to me that perhaps there should be an additional commandment, in addition to “Honour thy father and thy mother”, for this modern age: "Love and forgive your child".
★★★½ 

Dekalog 6: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

The sixth episode of Kieslowsky’s Dekalog, Dekalog 6: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”, seems at first to be a rather trivial story about a naive young man who becomes obsessively enamored with a woman he doesn’t even know. Both he and the more mature woman he admires, Magda, live in the same apartment complex that links all the characters and stories of the Dekalog series. In this installment the young man, Tomek, is a shy nineteen-year-old who works in the post office and lives with his godmother in an apartment facing Magda’s apartment. From his window at night, he spies on Magda by peering into her apartment with a telescope that he stole for that purpose from a local school. As we share his nightly gazing, we see that Magda is an attractive, confident, and somewhat promiscuous young woman who lives alone but has several lovers who pay frequent visits. Tomek sees everything through the unshielded window of Magda’s apartment.

In order to get a little closer to Magda, Tomek engages in a number of subterfuges that do not involve the risk of a genuine encounter. He makes phone calls to her at night, but doesn’t say anything into the phone. He sends her bogus money-order notices, so that she will come to the post office and make inquiries at his window. He steals some of her letters and reads them. Then he gets a morning milk-delivery job just so he can deliver milk to her apartment. And occasionally he interferes more emphatically, when he prankishly summons the gas-leak inspectors to her apartment while she is in the process of bedding one of her lovers. Eventually one of his bogus money-order notices causes an argument between Magda and the post office manager, and Tomek, feeling guilty, confesses everything to Magda. When she asks why he has done these things, he responds by saying that he loves her.

For Magda, “love” means making love; there is no such ethereal thing as true romantic love. But Tomek’s love is just that, and it is utterly innocent. He has no explicit carnal desires for Magda; he simply loves her. Magda is initially dismissive of this wimp, but also a little fascinated. Tomek is clearly too innocent and shy to be a serious threat to her, so she taunts him by puting on a show for his peeping telescope by positioning her lovemaking in front of the window and then informing her lover that they have been spied upon. The lover reacts with predictable rage by decking Tomek with one punch, and now it’s Magda’s turn to feel guilty. She accepts Tomek’s timid invitation to go to an ice-cream parlor, and they get to know each other a little. Tomek tells her all about his love for her, while Magda assures him that there is no such thing. Feeling sympathetic for him now, Magda tries to initiate Tomek into the kind of love that she knows, but this proves disastrous and Tomek runs away in horror. Little by little the tables are turned; it is Magda who is now seeking out Tomek with her spyglass and trying to find out what has happened to him. His innocent, passionate love has awakened something long-forgotten or dismissed in her. Has she destroyed something beautiful? The final stages of this story are exquisite in their understatement.

This episode, which initially seems trivial, proves in the end to be profound. The film is not about marital adultery, at all, but about adulterated love. Indeed, 'adulterated', i.e. debased, is not simply a corruption of 'adultery', but derived from the Latin 'adulteratus' and is the more primitive. The superb cinematography underscores what is the operative theme of the film. Most of the scenes in the film, even more than episode five (Dekalog 5: “Thou shalt not kill.”), comprise point-of-view shots of people looking at each other and trying to fathom what the other is thinking. This episode is almost a textbook example of how to shoot such scenes with effective continuity. In addition, Zbigniew Preisner’s melancholic music, which through its varying styles moodily permeates the entire Dekalog series, is unusually soulful in this one.

As Magda becomes aware that she is the object of such rapturous attention, she is at first angry, then playfully dismissive, and finally charmed. It is a passage from self-reflection, to contemplation of the ‘other’, and finally to further self-reflection. The idea of “the gaze” has drawn the attention of a number of philosophers, including Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the Feminist philosophers. Philosopher Shaun Gallagher summarizes the operative aspect of the gaze:

[T]he primary experience of the other is not that I perceive her as some kind of object in which I must find a person, but I perceive the other as a subject who perceives me as an object. My experience of the other is at the same time an experience that involves my own self-consciousness, a self-consciousness in which I am pre-reflectively aware that I am an object for another. This experience can further motivate a reflective self-consciousness, as I consider how I must appear to the other.

Actually, Tomek himself, has been the object of a tender gaze from the outset – that from his sympathetic godmother, sensitively played by Stefania Iwinska in her final role. She understands his lonely longing.

But the film is Magda’s ordeal as much as Tomek’s. When she is earnestly trying to find out what has happened to Tomek in the latter part of the film, one of her lovers knocks on her door. She doesn’t open it, and only tells him through the closed door, “I am not here”. Indeed, she isn’t. Her self-identity is now preoccupied with concern for another person and what may be going on in his mind (if he is still alive). She is not that “I” anymore.
★★★★

Dekalog 5: “Thou shalt not kill.”

Kieslowski’s fifth installment of his Dekalog series, Dekalog 5: “Thou shalt not kill.”, is an intense, sometimes unbearable, depiction of the horror of killing. The story follows three characters who are initially separate but whose paths not unexpectedly cross as the film develops. There is little contextual background concerning the characters, but as the story proceeds, we get an idea of their psychological profiles.

• Piotr is a young lawyer who is telling the story in connection with an interview for a prominent law firm. He is clean-cut, intelligent, sensitive, and committed to the highest ideals of justice. Early on in his storytelling, he reveals his strongly-held convictions opposing capital punishment.
• The taxi driver is a middle-aged man who lives in the housing complex that links all the episodes of Dekalog. As he goes about his daily activities, he is seen to be a mean-spirited, unsympathetic character, who refuses to pick up fares who might inconvenience him, leers at pretty young girls, and finds amusement in scaring little dogs by honking his horn at them.
• Jacek is an angry and alienated twenty-year-old who is aimlessly wandering about the city looking for and causing trouble wherever he goes. He throws rocks through car windshields on the freeway, scares away birds from bird-feeders, and roughs up weaker individuals when noone else is looking.

The separation of the characters, their alienation, is reflected in the distinctive cinematography, which has few establishing shots. The film isolates them from each other and from their environment by concentrating on closeups of the individuals throughout much of the film. By so doing, the filmmakers raise the narrative to an abstract level -- it is as if all three principal characters were involved in some meta-level dialogue with each other (and with the unseen witness).

It doesn’t take long for the viewer to suspect that Jacek is going to commit a murder, and he soon chooses the hapless taxi driver as his victim. The murder scene is not brief, as it is in most films, but excruciatingly long and brutal, and it takes some time for the bludgeoned taxi driver to die. Jacek is inhuman and remorseless throughout. But we are still only halfway through the film, and another murder will occupy the second half.

Soon enough, Jacek is duly arrested and convicted of the crime, and despite the efforts of his earnest defense attorney, Piotr, Jacek is sentenced to death. The rest of the film depicts the equally inhuman machinations of the government legal and punitive system as it prepares for and executes the second murder: the execution of Jacek.

The brutality of the execution sequences has led many reviewers to view the film as primarily a statement against capital punishment. But Kieslowski has objected to this characterisation: it’s not against capital punishment per se, he says, it’s against killing, categorically. And to emphasize this distinction, scenarists Piesiewicz and Kieslowski have departed from the usual depiction of murder, which focuses on the victim – the injury, the suffering, the death. In this film, instead, the focus is on the brutality of the killer and the killing, irrespective of the alleged innocence of the victim. To emphasize this focus, the victim of each of the two killings is far from being a sympathetic character. In the first half of the film, a repugnant character, the taxi driver, is killed by Jacek. We are forced to face up to the wrongfulness of this act, no matter how unlikable the victim. In the second half of the film, the focus is on the societal killing-machine that carries out capital punishment. But unlike many films opposed to capital punishment which depict the victimization and wrongful execution of an essentially innocent man who was the victim of circumstances, there is absolutely no doubt or qualification about the guilt of Jacek. He is infinitely more objectionable than the taxi driver. And yet he is a human being, just as the taxi driver was. Piotr is granted a final half hour in Jacek’s cell just prior to his execution, and he learns a little more about Jacek. There is some suggestion revealed in this scene that Jacek’s recollections of his beloved younger sister, who had been run over and killed five years earlier, set him off in a murderous rage when he happened to see the taxi driver leering at a young woman. But this is neither an explanation nor a justification of Jacek’s heinous act – it only reminds us of the pervasiveness of human weakness and vulnerability.

Although the emphasis on the essential inhumanity of the killing, itself, and away from the suffering of the victim distills the argument against killing, it also make the film less compelling as a story and more cerebral. This is because the moral conundrum that underlies this episode is centered on the social-thinking Piotr, rather than on the other two self-interested characters, the taxi driver and Jacek. Thus depending on your tastes, you may find that this more-distancing narrative style either weakens or strengthens the argument.

Of course, almost everyone would say that he or she is generally opposed to killing, but the issue becomes more cloudy to them when the subject of punishing vicious killers is raised. How is social order to be maintained in this age of declining values? In the outer narrative Piotr remarks to his legal interviewers,

“People ask themselves whether what they do has a meaning. The meaning is becoming increasingly evasive.. . . there’s a decline in criteria, values.”

So how should society react to this degenerative social condition, a condition that produces minor sinners like of the taxi driver and major sinners like Jacek? Should it merely take revenge by punishing those people who have lost their way, who have lost their values? Or should it do something to help restore those lost values? Certainly the penal machinery that carries out Jacek’s execution is as valueless and inhuman as Jacek, himself. This does not support social values, but further devalues society. This carrying out of “justice” is merely an act of animalistic revenge, and there is no convincing evidence that executions have a deterrent effect on homicides. So what is the payoff derived from capital punishment? Piotr asks rhetorically,

“For whom does the law avenge? In the name of the innocent? Do the innocent make the rules?”

In this case the rules are made by the vengeful, and they are not the innocent. In fact even if it were some day to be shown that capital punishment did have some deterrent effect, it would still be wrong for the state to engage in killing. Taking life is not an act that should be condoned by any truly civilized society, a society in which our actions are held to be meaningful. In fact, participation in the killing of any animals for any reason, such as for eating meat, is unworthy of the truly civilized individual.
★★★½ 

Dekalog 4: ”Honor thy father and thy mother.”

This episode of Dekalog, Dekalog 4: ”Honor thy father and thy mother.”, definitely centers on the commandment to honor thy father and thy mother, but it also relates to the integrity and rigidity of social roles. This one is notable for its superb cinematography (Kieslowski used different cinematographers for most of the episodes). The story tells of Anka, a beautiful twenty-year-old drama student, who lives at home with her father, Michal. The two have a very close, personal relationship, since Anka has been raised entirely by her father following her mother's death when Anka was only five days old.

One day Michal leaves on a business trip for a few weeks, and during his absence, Anka discovers a letter in his desk that says, “to be opened after my death”. So immediately the overwhelming temptation arises to “dishonor” her father’s wishes and see what’s inside the letter. Anka thinks about it, but eventually succumbs and opens it, only to find another letter inside from her deceased mother and addressed directly to her .

When her father returns, Anka angrily confronts her father with what she has learned from the letter: that Michal is not her real, biological father. She is angry that she was never told the “truth”. But her father responds that he never knew the contents of that letter and was never sure about the truth of this, himself, and so he always delayed revealing her mother’s letter to her.

The rest of the film is essentially a long, beautifully photographed, conversation between Michal and Anka to get to the bottom of things. Anka is committed to knowing the truth and avoiding deception, and she gets Michal to swear to revealing his true feelings, no matter how painful. As an actress, Anka has been instructed to find the “inner truth” of a role in order to make it authentic, but it seems to me that this instruction is only a metaphor for more authentic and effective role-playing on the stage and not a sure-fire general prescription for finding absolute truth. In fact Anka's actions over the course of the film reveal subsequently that the truth is often very elusive, indeed.

In the ensuing conversations, Anka reveals to Michal that she has always a more than straightforward filial feelings for Michal -- she has always had ambiguous, long-suppressed urges that suggested to her the romantic love between a man and a woman. She then gets Michal to confess that he, too, has had similar unrealized feelings for her. The implication from all this is that now that she was a mature and biologically unrelated woman, there was no moral law standing in the way of their consummating their long-held-back love. Or was there?

But, of course, for the past twenty years they have developed their relationship as father and daughter. They have been playing those social roles for Anka’s entire life, and how are they now going to be able to alter this fundamental relationship and behaviour? Is this possible, and is it what they really want?

The morning after these searing revelations, Anka runs to her father and confesses that she had never really read her mother’s letter. She had made up the whole story about Michal not being her father and had forged a fake letter in her mother's handwriting to show to Michal. Both she and Michal may have their suspicions about this, but the truth remains buried and unrevealed in her mother’s letter. Nevertheless, this lie of Anka's has led to the revelations of other truths concerning the real feelings between Anka and Michal. She now asks Michal what they should do about the real, still-unread letter. At the moment, the truth is sill unknown, and the "irreversible" change in their relationship has not yet, it seems, taken place.

What they finally decide to do is both satisfying and unsatisfying to the dramatic closure of the story, depending on your own point of view. Because she had lied about that crucial piece of evidence, Anka's actions on that occasion call into question the truth of everything else she has expressed. But that lie reveals a continuation of Anka’s pattern concerning “honoring” her father and her mother. On the surface of things, she has dishonored her parents in many ways, especially when she lied to Michal about having read the letter. And her culminating action at the end of the film concerning the disposition of the real letter is also a dishonoring of her mother's wishes, in a way. But as a student of drama, she must be aware of the necessary ambiguity of all the roles one plays, both on the stage and in society at large. And perhaps that ambiguity, that subtlety, has its own authenticity, its own inner truth.
★★★½ 

Dekalog 3: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

The third episode of Dekalog, Dekalog 3: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”, concerns an encounter between a married man and his former lover on Christmas Eve. The story is not so much about remembering or breaking the Sabbath (although Christmas Eve in Poland usually entails attending a Midnight Mass to commemorate the birth of Jesus), as it is about duty, loneliness, and by implication, self identity. On this evening Janusz returns to his home from his job as a taxi driver, but he is now dressed as Santa Claus in order to delight his young children. On the way into his apartment building, he passes Krzysztof, the tragedy-struck and saddened college professor from Dekalog 1, which further evokes and reminds the viewer how important family can be to well-being. In parrallel with Janusz’s family gathering, we also see a young woman, Ewa, who goes to visit her aunt, possibly her only existing family member, who is so senile she is unable to participate in the Christmas festivities of the rest home where she is staying. Later everyone goes to Midnight Mass, and Janusz and Ewa happen to notice each other in the congregation. Ewa, we will soon learn, is Janusz’s former lover, and they will get together that night.

The acting in this episode is, as usual, very good, but Maria Pakulnis in the role of Ewa is particularly outstanding. However, the general quality of this narrative isn't quite up to the standards of most of the other episodes. Rather than being a story concerning the events and activities of external circumstances, this episode, like many others in Dekalog, is a relationship film, wherein events depicted are associated with internal journeys of individual participants. The weakness in this episode, though, is the fact that this particular internal journey doesn’t really seem to go anywhere. To a certain extent it travels aimlessly in circles during the roughly eight hours of action. Perhaps to compensate for this lack of story movement, the film only very slowly reveals the background information about the principal characters that one needs to know to understand what is going on. So the viewer is essentially engaged in a mystery, trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle in order to reach a full understanding. At the same time, Janusz is also engaged in a puzzle-solving problem of his own, trying to understand Ewa’s odd behaviour. Of course Janusz, having had a relationship with Ewa, knows many things that the viewer doesn’t, but also the viewer is sometimes shown some things that Janusz doesn’t know.

After Janusz returns home from the mass, he answers a query from his entry phone. It turns out to be Ewa, and Janusz makes up an excuse to his wife that his taxi has been stolen and rushes outside to see what Ewa wants. Ewa is distraught and tells him that her husband, Edward, has disappeared and wants Janusz to help her find him. Since this is the most family-important evening of the year, Janusz is reluctant to go with her. At the same time Janusz feels some responsibility towards Ewa, and this establishes the ethical tension that continues throughout the film: how much can he, and should he, give himself to Ewa at the expense of his wife and family? He first asks Ewa if she was at mass that night, and she responds that she wasn’t. Since he, himself, saw her there, this provides him with his first inkling that Ewa is lying. In fact it will turn out that she is lying about almost everything. The rest of the film covers their search at hospitals, police stations, and train stations to see if they can find the missing, supposedly seriously inebriated, Edward.

After some time it is revealed that the affair between Janusz and Ewa had ended three years earlier when Edward caught the two of them together in bed. They both still harbor resentment towards each other concerning that event, but it is clear that they each still have a strong attachment towards the other. Their characters are different, though. Janusz is relatively innocent and simple, while the scheming Ewa is highly emotional, contradictory, and even self-destructive. During the evening she alternately expresses affection or extreme bitterness toward Janusz, while he, himself, looks on incredulously.

Finally, we and Janusz learn the truth about Ewa's situation. It is ultimately revealed that Edward had actually left her and gone to live in Krakow three years ago. There is no Edward to be found in this city, and the whole search has been a wild goose chase. Ewa's aunt is so senile that she barely recognizes her. The one person who can see inside her, as she sees her true self, is Janusz, but he is unattainable now, since he has his family to look after. It turns out that the whole evening has merely been an elaborate game on Ewa’s part. On this the most personal and inward-looking family evening of the year, Ewa had concocted a plot of lies in order to spend the entire night until seven in the morning with Janusz. The fact that she succeeds in doing this gives her some sort of consolation and apparently has helped ward off the loneliness for one night, at least.

So nothing is really resolved by what happens in the film. Janusz goes back to his knowing and sensitive wife and assures her that he will remain loyal. He will be OK. On the other hand, the lonely Ewa is tormented by her emotional ups and downs and desperately needs someone exactly like the stalwart Janusz to look after her and keep her on a steady keel. At the end of the story, she tells Janusz about seeing an escapee from a mental institution that evening getting caught and returned to the asylum, thereby alluding to her own emotional fragility that borders on bipolar depression. What will become of her?
★★★

Dekalog 2: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”

In the second episode of Dekalog, Dekalog 2: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”, Dorota is a young woman earnestly seeking the consultation of an elderly doctor who happens to be her neighbor in the high-rise housing complex in which the series is situated. The doctor is a senior physician at the hospital, and he lives alone, having lost his family many years before. Dorota’s husband, Andrzej, is mortally ill in the doctor’s cancer ward, and she is urgently trying to find out about his condition and his chances for survival. Even this basic information is revealed only slowly, as the film is shot mostly in closeup on the two principal characters going about relatively mundane activities. The doctor is shown to be a gruff, lonely figure who is set in his ways, and the viewer may wonder why considerable viewing time is spent watching him simply puttering around in his apartment and tending to his cacti. But the slowly developed character threads are brought together in the end. And while much of the film’s screen time is devoted to Dorota’s activities, the thematically significant character development is that of the doctor. When the story reaches its ironic conclusion, it brings about a satisfying closure and elevates the entire narrative to a sublime viewing experience.

The doctor’s detachment from human feeling is revealed by the manner in which he tells a probably oft-repeated story to his housekeeper. The story turns out to be how his entire family, including his daughter and infant son, was obliterated during a World War II air raid some forty years earlier, and in his dispassionate storytelling we see the degree to which he has insulated himself from such a horror.

As a senior physician in charge of a cancer ward, the doctor is matter-of-fact about death and shows no particular interest in seeing the woman any earlier than the usual once-a-week two-hour period when family members may consult with the doctors – especially since his only previous connection with this woman was her running over his dog with her car two years earlier. But Dorota is so insistent that he finally relents to an earlier meeting, and it is then, fully half-way through the film, that we finally learn what is really at issue. She reveals to the doctor that she has never been able to have children before, but now she is three-months pregnant – only the expectant father is not Andrzej. She believes that this is probably her only chance ever to have a baby, and she wants to know from the doctor whether Andrzej will recover or not. If the answer is yes, she will have an abortion, but if the answer is no, she will have the baby and live together with the baby’s father, Janek.

The doctor does not want to be in the position of making such a life-or-death decision and tells her that medical science cannot predict the precise outcome of any patient – there are always exceptions. But Dorota needs to have a definitive answer and won’t let the doctor get away without him telling her everything he knows. She tries to do the impossible and explain herself to the old man, asserting to him in anguished tones that, yes, it is indeed possible to love two men at the same time. He looks back at her noncommittally, and she recognizes the hopelessness of her task. Even so, the doctor does try and get her some more authoritative information, without making that ultimate decision for her. And little by little, and probably against his will, as well, the doctor is becoming more intimately involved in the life of another person. He goes back and checks Andrzej’s condition and medical tests in more detail. He finally tells her that her husband’s prospects are actually extremely grim: there is probably no more than a 15% chance that he will even linger on for awhile.

Dorota, though, is still agonizing over what decision to make. After watching her barely conscious husband’s suffering in the hospital, where even the sound of dripping water is agonizing for him, she finally decides to commit herself to his fate and go ahead and have the abortion. Even though his chances of survival are negligible, she decides to give up her chance of having the baby. And when she tells this to her lover, Janek, they both recognize that her decision means abandonment of any future life together, regardless of whether Andrzej survives or not.

Dorota then goes back to the hospital to tell the doctor of her decision and take him off the hook concerning the unborn child’s fate. She has made the decision on her own terms. But to her shock, the doctor suddenly abandons his detached demeanor and emphatically tells her not to have the abortion. Andrzej’s condition is absolutely hopeless, he tells her, and she should definitely not have the abortion. Still wavering, Dorota asks the doctor to swear to what he had said, and this is where the Biblical Commandment of the episode’s title is engaged. The doctor says, “I swear”.

When someone swears to something, it implies a solemn oath in affirmation of belief in some sacred being or text, such as the Bible. This is what Dorota probably intuitively meant. But for a scientist, such as the doctor, the use of the term ‘swear’ would attest to the doctor’s firm belief in the integrity of science, itself. In this case the doctor was swearing on the basis of his scientific credo. On the basis of his further investigations, the doctor is now sufficiently sure of his judgement, and wants Dorota to know and profit from his knowledge. His own baby was killed in that long-ago bomb blast, and he wants Dorota to have the chance that he didn’t have to raise a child. He has, to a certain extent, been restored to life – to a concern about the fate of Dorota. He even tells her as she leaves his office that he knows she is a violonist for the Philharmonia and that he would like to come and hear her play sometime.

But the world, and the Lord, work in mysterious ways, and science cannot predict everything. A miraculous event dramatically alters the circumstances for those concerned at the close of the story. Despite the doctor's "oath", things came out differently. The old doctor is praised for his scientific skills by a jubilant, expectant parent and asked rhetorically whether he “understands” what it means to have a child. The doctor, still not revealing the depth of his feelings, understands all too well.
★★★★

Dekalog 1: “I am the Lord, thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”

This episode of Dekalog, Dekalog 1: “I am the Lord, thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”, concerns Krzysztof, a successful young university professor who lives alone with his 11-year-old son, Pavel in the housing complex. Pavel’s mother lives elsewhere and is now only a distant presence in Pavel’s life: he is looked after by his aunt Irena when his father is occupied at the university. It is clear from the early sequences that Pavel is an intellectually gifted child, and that although there is no mother around, he has a vibrant and loving relationship with his father and aunt. He is the perfect child. His father treats him almost like an adult, patiently plays intellectual games on their computers with him, and honestly shares his thoughts with his son. But there is a difference in outlook between the two adults looking after him. As an educated modernist and rational skeptic, Krzysztof relies entirely on modern science and empirical validation. Irena is more traditional, though, and feels that there are limits to what science can explain.

One day Pavel becomes disturbed after seeing a dead dog in the neighborhood and asks his father about death – what happens when you die? Krzysztof gives his honest response: death occurs when the brain stops getting blood and it ceases to function. “Everything stops; it’s the end,” he says. Pavel asks, “so what’s left?” Krzysztof says that the only thing that persists is the memory of that person. When Pavel asks about the eternal soul, his father responds that the idea of a soul is merely a convenient fiction that comforts some people, like Aunt Irena.

For Krzysztof, the nature of reality, i.e. what is, is only what we can understand and manipulate. Reality is what can be expressed semantically using logical constructions. Everything else must be held in doubt. In this, Krzysztof embraces the mainstream position of modern Anglo-American analytical philosophy, the dominant academic school. In a lecture later on, Krzysztof, whose field is apparently computational linguistics, discusses the great difficulty of expressing all the various cultural associations of people, the “metasemantics” of a language. But he stops near the end of his lecture and speculates that with more computational resources, new algorithms, etc, it may be possible to create a computer that can replicate a human – one that can have aesthetic experiences. In this lecture Krzysztof expresses his belief, one held by those in the “Strong Artificial Intelligence” scholarly community -- that human thought and experience is not fundamentally different from the operations of a digital computer. Someday it may be possible to reproduce with mechanical and electronic artifacts a human being.

One day in the winter, Pavel wants to try out his new ice skates on the frozen lake. Krzysztof shows Pavel how his mathematical modelling computer program can determine whether the ice on the lake will be thick enough to allow safe skating. It should be based on whether the air temperature over the preceding few days was low enough. This is physics. The calculation is made, and they observe that the program returns values that indicate that the ice will be safe. Just to make sure, Krzysztof goes out on the ice after Pavel goes to sleep and tests it with his own weight.

But the world isn’t always predictable, even with the laws of physics at hand. One evening Krzysztof’s computer turns on by itself and boots up for some reason. Krzysztof, at home with the idea that computers are not that different from humans, metaphorically asks his computer what it wants. On another occasion while Krzysztof is at his desk writing in his notebook, he notices a mysterious black spot spreading across the page. It turns out to be ink from an unexpectedly cracked ink bottle. It’s always easier to explain what happened unexpectedly after the fact than it is to predict the future.

And finally the most tragically unexpected thing of all happens. When Pavel goes out alone one evening to skate on the ice, he doesn’t return. The ice has broken. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. The last third of the film covers Krzysztof’s response to this unfathomable tragedy and what it does to him. A great narrative does not simply comprise the external events that take place, but also encompasses the goals, plans, and desires of the agents engaged in that narrative. In this story the external events are straightforward and basically simple, but the narrative interest and its beauty lie in how we understand the yearnings, plans, and accommodations made by Pavel, Krzysztof, and Irena to those external events.

A naive interpretation of this story would suggest that God punished Krzysztof for transgressing the commandment and putting his faith in science ahead of God. But certainly the story of the film is much more profound than that, and in fact the film mocks such a trivial view of reality and life. Instead of that simple view, the film narrative confronts us with the incomprehensibly tragic, fatalistic loneliness of our existence. There is no escape. Both Krzysztof and Irena, with their contrasting perspectives, are overwhelmed by the loss. Neither has an answer, and we share the recognition that we are all equally powerless. As foreshadowed in the opening sequence, only the memory persists.
★★★★