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.
★★★★

Krzysztof Kieslowski

Films of Krzysztof Kieslowski:

• Dekalog - Krzysztof Kieslowski (1989)

1. Dekalog 1: “I am the Lord, thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”
2. Dekalog 2: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”
3. Dekalog 3: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”
4. Dekalog 4: ”Honor thy father and thy mother.”
5. Dekalog 5: “Thou shalt not kill.”
6. Dekalog 6: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
7. Dekalog 7: “Thou shalt not steal.”
8. Dekalog 8: “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”
9. Dekalog 9: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”
10. Dekalog 10: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.”

• Heaven - Tom Tykwer (2002)