There likely aren't many filmmakers who don't believe that they could produce an unforgettable masterpiece if they were allowed to take ten hours to tell their story. Actually delivering the goods is a whole different story though, and Kieslowski's overwhelming 10-part miniseries for Polish television The Decalogue is a more memorable accomplishment then even his later more celebrated Three Colors trilogy. Each of the ten one-hour episodes is inspired by one of the Ten Commandments, an ambitious idea whose potential for offputting preachiness is wholly avoided by the absence of any direct mention of the relevant Commandment in the films or their credits (you have to consult the video box) and by the complexity of the stories' understated ties to the Commandments and to religion generally. Reason, faith, marital fidelity, sex, love, voyeurism, murder, parenthood, political courage, envy, greed, and stamp collecting: all these subjects and more are dramatized with great visual economy and emotional force. Each episode focuses on different characters, but the episodes are loosely interconnected by their mutual setting in and around a giant apartment complex in Warsaw, which allows major characters from one episode to have cameo roles in others. And to further unify the whole, Artur Barcis appears briefly as an unnamed witnessing bystander in every episode, a kind of recording angel who never speaks or intervenes, but whose presence remindes us of the interconnectedness of the various individuals we see making decisions under stress. Taken together the sense of the richness and variousness of human life and feeling that emerges, even in so stark a setting, is exhilarating.
All the episodes are well-written (by Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz) and well-acted, and the depth and thoughtfulness of the women's roles are particularly notable. The most gripping episodes are: Decalogue I, in which a parent 's overcommitent to scientific reason and elevation of its false deity the computer has terrible results; Decalogue V, wherein the breach of the injunction "thou shalt not kill" is chillingly enacted both by a wholly unsympathetic murderer and by the state (capital punishment), and is equally repellent in both instances; Decalogue VI , which finds a fresh take on the cinematic staple of voyeurism; and Decalogue X, a comic revisiting of the Dickensian theme of siblings struggling with greed and family ties in the wake of a parent's death and a subsequent large inheritance. In these and the rest of the episodes are situations that seem to clearly anticipate some of the most strikingly "original' moments of more recent films as diverse as Breaking the Waves, Happiness, and The Sweet Hereafter. Dig in.