The Perpetual Wound: Part 2-Dekalog:

(There may be spoilers ahead, but Decalogue is not about some plot, not about the visuals, not about the music but just the feel. It is like you are a silent narrator who observes without judging, maybe like the angels in “City of Angels”, being there but not involved.)

Let me set matters straight, Decalogue is not a movie in a conventional sense. It’s a series of ten separate one hour features knitted together with the thread of human suffering. Kieślowski, along with Piesiewicz, visualized this feature as his personal homage to the Ten Commandments passed on to Moses by the creator whom we so lovingly call with the three letter name, god. But the series is not a biblical account of the ten commandments it is more of a study of the various emotions that bring about grief, a rambling with the commandments as backdrop, placed just as a guide while the director and his crew paint a picture of a desolate society where each of these commandments are transgressed with a brutal candor.

The commandments are pretty straightforward but in Kieślowski’s hand it becomes something utterly profound and deep. You shall not worship other gods (Part 1) translates to a story of a father who looses his son in a freak incident at the lake. His crime, he built a computer that could predict when the ice would melt but like any device controlled by man, it can err and it did, making the son drown in the icy waters of the lake. The movie is about the guilt of a man and grief of a father on his only child's loss. The final scene with the father tumbling over the candles in the church, and the wax spilled over the virgin Mary’s eyes was poignant and tastefully done. Similar in taste is the second part (Not take god’s name in vain) about an old, grumpy doctor who observes disdainfully at a woman in his apartment whose husband is his patient and is in comma for long. The woman wants an opinion to whether her husband shall survive so that she can decide whether to keep the baby whose father is her husband’s best friend. This choice is the cause for her anxiety, her grief. She loves her husband, no doubt about it, but she wants the baby as well. It is the doctor’s answer that would make her decide and that forms the crux of this plot, the doctor being asked to play god, taking god’s name in vain.
Grief takes multiple facets in these series where people lie, kill, feel jealous, and feel roused. They get angry, they have incestuous feelings, some kidnap their kid sister and some don’t trust their brothers, they in a it create a plethora of alternative plots showcasing human folly and the resultant pain.

The fifth part, which was developed later into a full-length movie “A short film about killing”, is a take on capital punishment, with the director drawing parallels to the crime that of the killing of a cab driver to that of the punishment, society hanging the twenty one year old murderer. The movie begins brilliantly with images of some poisoned cockroaches feasting on some rotten bread. The scene moves to a dead rat, may be killed by some random cat, and then cuts to a cat hanging from the noose and boys running away with a jolly abandon. The central idea of the movie, the opposition to capital punishment, is emphasized at that particular point, Kieślowski with his violent portrayal of the act of murder and an equally despicable depiction of the hanging inside the jail barracks, likens the two and questions the morality of the acts. The sixth part, which was also developed as “A short film about love”, questions the morality in the act of love and ponders about lust and the inter-relation between the two. The movie about a small kid who spies on her beautiful neighbor is humiliated sexually by her when she finds out and he attempts to take his own life. Loneliness stands out in this feature, as well as in the previous one, as a precursor to grief, with the bleak white background, an tottering old woman and some chilling music, adding to the silent grief of all the characters, making it so very profound. This movie also shows how a perfect movie even if copied scene by scene doesn’t produce the same effect sans it soul. For the un-initiated this was copied into the disastrous “Ek choti si love story” which reduced the plot to a sleazy soft porn.

The genius of the director is shown in the seventh feature, which showcases the commandment, “thou shall not steal”. In the hands of any ordinary artist, it may have been just a clichéd enactment of a thief repenting or the like but Kieślowski makes it a bewitching performance of a young daughter who kidnaps her ‘sister’ who in reality is her daughter. The daughter(the one who kidnaps), who looks and seems eccentric, is dominated by her strong willed mother who has made the world convince that her grand daughter is actually her daughter. At that point, the viewer is wonderfully unsure of who the commandment applies to, the mother or the daughter. The fourth feature, (Thou shall respect your parents) is more shocking and brilliantly disturbing. It begins with a young pretty girl drenching an older man, may be in his forties and then the older man taking his revenge in a playful way. The keen eye can no doubt mark a spark of love and maybe a speck of sexual tension, and then suddenly out of the blue, he is introduced as the father. As the story progresses, the young lady discovers a letter in her father’s desk from her long dead mother where she mentions that, her father is actually not his birth father and all the repressed emotions suddenly comes to the hilt, swinging destructively to break their relationship. Both these features talk about grief resulting from deep-rooted passions pent up in human souls.

Guilt is an exciting vice which when comes to the surface produces a fascinating plethora of emotions. The Eight feature is about a professor of ethics who comes face to face with her past in the shape of an visiting professor who as a child was betrayed to the Nazis by the same professor. This unlikely interaction lays all their past ghosts to rest and give both a chance to survive with their trust in humanity rekindled.

The Ninth feature is about jealousy, it is about one man who, after having multiple partners, turns impotent one fine day and he requests his wife to find a lover. His wife responds that sex is just an act that she always found cumbersome but then she does take a lover. The husband, in spite of his previous statements, becomes jealous and starts spying on his wife who breaks up with him when she founds that out and he leaps over a bridge to end it all. Confused, but that is Kieślowski for you, betrayal here is two ways, the wife betrayed the trust by taking a lover, the husband betrayed her trust by questioning her love and his own faith. This feature draws a thin line and underlines the difference between love and the act of love. Dakalog three is about a cab driver who leaves his family during Christmas to help an ex lover search for his current partner. The entire feature has a sublime desire glowing in the background with the underlined tension between the ex lovers. Both the features showcase the difficulty in letting go, the grief and pain that is associated with every cease in an relationship.

Feature ten is about obsession, it is about two brothers who obsess over completing their dad’s stamp collection and in the process loose much more, one even his kidney. Bordering on comedy, this feature showcases filial differences and grief resulting from lack of trust.

The movie is a must watch with all its nuances, each beat necessary and every moment priceless. Developed primarily for ten different directors to direct, Kieślowski just couldn’t let go, like his characters he suffered from the grief of parting from his stories and he made each of them with different cinematographers trying to change the look and how he succeeded is for all to see.

There is one character that appears in each of his feature, just looking with a peering glance, not judging just observing, not a participant in the stories developing around him. There Kieślowski got us into the film, we are that man watching a movie not judging the characters but judging ourselves, hoping to become better, sometimes successful, sometimes without success. But the important thing is to at the least “try”.

Part 3: Grief from Bereavement