Dazzling Decalogue

By RICHARD CORLISS

You can see some movies on 5,000 screens, and they look just like all the other behemoths clogging your local 'plex. But every once in a while a unique film work appears on one screen as a lonely reminder of what cinema can summon in intelligence, scope and power. That would be Decalogue, the 10-part cycle of short films that Krzysztof Kieslowski made for Polish TV in 1988-89. Long withheld from U.S. distribution, the series will be shown this week at Manhattan's Walter Reade Theater. A cinephile's fondest hope is that the series will soon travel to other venues or be released on videocassette. And not a moment too soon, for Decalogue may be the great film achievement of the past decade.

Kieslowski, who died two years ago at 54 after heart-bypass surgery, was perhaps Europe's most revered director. Several of his pictures--The Double Life of Veronique, Blue and Red--were swank fables of anomie in which seductive color schemes enveloped gorgeous actresses like a Chanel shroud. The films nearly turned despair into a fashion statement.

Decalogue is different; stuff happens. This series--with each 53- to 58-minute episode dramatizing one of the Ten Commandments through the lives of the residents of a Warsaw apartment house--revels in the convolutions of melodrama. There are two brutal killings, a few attempted suicides, even a car chase. A perfect child dies. Another child is told, Chinatown-style, that her sister is really her mother. At times Decalogue plays like a Polish Melrose Place.

That proves only that Kieslowski was also an entertainer. The ambiguity and poignancy of each sketch show that he was always an artist. In Decalogue, One (Thou Shalt Have No Other God but Me), a math professor lives with his bright, loving 11-year-old son--a small boy who asks big questions about God and death. The father believes that everything can be measured, even the density of ice on the local pond. It will take a catastrophe to teach him that his logic has holes. But the episode's true poetry is in scenes of the boy's love for his father and aunt. God, we see, is in a child's easy embrace.

Over and over, the comfortable affection at the beginning of an episode is tested and twisted by fate. In Decalogue, Four (Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother), Anka, a pretty young actress who flirtatiously dotes on her father, finds a letter from her mother, who died just after the girl's birth. This man is not her father! The physical closeness the man and girl shared, natural when paternal, is now replayed in Anka's mind as an erotic mating dance. Did he feel that way too? she asks him in a love scene of wondrous and creepy intimacy. And is Anka, finally, a cannier actress than we knew?

Kieslowski and his gifted screenwriting colleague, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, knew that drama begins with the human face; it is a sponge for the viewer's emotional complicity. So the camera takes closeup mug shots of faces in love or anxiety. Or it crouches furtively, behind a tree, in a closet like a fretful nephew or an avid voyeur. It watches ordinary people (including some of the most beautiful actresses in Europe) tangling with moral demons, holding on to what they were taught to believe or--this being real life in Poland just after martial law--what they have learned to settle for.

Neither Kieslowski nor Piesiewicz was a practicing Catholic. They were interested in examining the relevance of old laws in a Catholic country in a postmoral age. Decalogue, Five, which was made into a longer piece called A Short Film About Killing, shows two brutal, useless murders. In the first a drifter, for no special reason, strangles a taxi driver; the scene lasts seven excruciating minutes. In the second the killer is hanged by the state; that execution takes only a moment, but it is no less ugly or vindictive. The state, like individuals, has few reasons, many excuses. Kieslowski absolves no one.

Yet he understands all. In the best of the films, Decalogue, Six (Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery)--also released as the feature-length A Short Film About Love--a young man spies through a telescope on the sexually active stunner across the way. When she learns of his rank love, she is furious; to teach him a lesson she forces upon him the banquet of her sexual favors. Contact shames him; he runs home and slashes his wrists. Visiting his home, she peers through the telescope and sees an eerie vision: herself, as the adoring boy saw her. The image overwhelms her.

It has the same impact on a viewer, for this film is Kieslowski's confession of the awful power in watching people--which is exactly what movies are. Now audiences have the precious opportunity to watch a great filmmaker watching us.