Dekalog (1989)

Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. Starring Henryk Baranowski, Wojciech Klata, Maja Komorowska, Krystyna Janda, Olgierd Łukaszewicz, Daniel Olbrychski, Maria Pakulnis, Joanna Szczepkowska, Adrianna Biedrzyńska, Janusz Gajos, Mirosław Baka, Krzysztof Globisz, Jan Tesarz, Grażyna Szapołowska, Olaf Lubaszenko, Anna Polony, Maja Barełkowska, Wladysław Kowalski, Maria Koscialkowska, Teresa Marczewska, Ewa Błaszczyk, Piotr Machalica, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Jerzy Stuhr.

Ten very loosely connected stories centered on tenants in a Polish housing project, with each story posing moral dilemmas related in some way to one of the Ten Commandments. A nineteen-year-old boy peeps on his neighbor (“Thou shalt not commit adultery”), a father and son turn to a remarkable computer program for guidance (“I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have other gods before me”), a thoughtlessly cruel man murders a taxi driver and dumps the body in a river (“Thou shalt not commit murder”), and so on. A unique and frequently powerful film, originally released in Poland as a ten-part television miniseries, and it doesn’t suffer from mixed results the way most anthology-type films do—there are no “misses” here, and all ten carry over tonal and atmospheric elements (along with a few motifs and recurring background characters played by Artur Barciś), which leave imprints as distinct as they are indelible. Despite the religious roots of its “gimmick”, there’s no sermonizing or judgment going on here; Kieślowski’s intimate and subtle filmmaking techniques eschew instant gratification in favor of ambivalence that lingers—more questions than answers, more to ponder than argue—and it’s not a straight line from setup to payoff, as many of the predicaments transmute in terms of perspective and moral weight (e.g., who is the real thief in the seventh story of a single mother kidnapping her child from the girl’s grandmother?). Running more than nine-and-a-half hours, it’s too much to take in at once, so I recommend experiencing it in pieces—two or three chapters at a time—and it’s also worth seeking out expanded features based on two of these stories from Kieślowski: A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love.

95/100