Director Vishal Bharadwaj’s repeated references to it have spawned a new interest in Dekalog.
Most people I know who have lately waded into the vast ocean of “World Cinema” are familiar with the Three Colours trilogy, made by the great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski (whose films are as simple and direct as his first name is complicated and daunting). But of late, I’ve noticed an increasing interest in an earlier, relatively lower profile Kieslowski work: the 10-part Dekalog (The Decalogue), made as a series of television episodes in the late 1980s. And the reason for this escalating interest, apparently, is director Vishal Bharadwaj, who has (in the storm of media interviews and profiles that accompanied the release of Kaminey) made repeated references to Dekalog as being a huge influence on his career as a film-buff and filmmaker.
Visually and thematically speaking, there is little to link Bharadwaj’s recent films (the energetic Kaminey in particular) with Kieslowski’s work, but that’s one of the charming things about movie influences — they don’t have to be blindingly obvious, with clearly connecting dots and “Aha!” moments. (Is anyone else fed up of the repeated channeling of Tarantino and Guy Ritchie whenever Bhardwaj’s latest is discussed?) It’s possible for entirely disparate films and filmmaking styles to call out to each other across space and time.
Kieslowski is, along with Satyajit Ray, among the gentlest directors I know, and his best work is marked by a similarly intense engagement with the lives and dilemmas of human beings. His movies aren’t cinematic in the flashier sense of the word — the camerawork is mostly at the service of the narrative and the dialogue, the editing is practically invisible — but they have a quiet, hypnotic energy that draws a viewer straight in. Each of the 10 films in Dekalog is around an hour long, set in a middle-class apartment block in Warsaw, and each of them is a modern-day reworking of one of the Ten Commandments. Thus, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” becomes a story about a staunchly rationalist professor whose over-reliance on the data provided by his computer leads to tragedy. “Thou shalt not kill” becomes a penetrating study of a young murderer facing the death penalty (in an episode that would later be expanded into the acclaimed, feature-length A Short Film About Killing).
Kieslowski was an agnostic himself, but he was very interested in the relationship between people and their faith, as well as the concepts of sin and punishment. The stories in Dekalog are not morality tales with an obvious “message” or dictum; there is nothing one-dimensional about the situations they depict. In one episode, for instance, a woman persistently asks a doctor what her ill husband’s chances of survival are. The reason for her desperation, we soon discover, is that she is carrying another man’s baby (possibly her last chance to have a child) and her decision to keep or abort it will depend on whether her husband will recover. What adds another shade to this story is that the doctor’s response is coloured by a tragic incident from his own past. As this complex, painful story unfolds, it becomes obvious that the director is more interested in human beings than in stone tablets.
Dekalog can be slow going at times, especially for viewers who get impatient with movies driven more by content than form, or built mainly around dialogue.
For that reason, I wouldn’t recommend attempting to see all the films over a short period of time; a better idea would be to spread the experience over a fortnight or so. For now, one thing on my to-do list is to rewatch Bharadwaj’s films like Maqbool and The Blue Umbrella and to look for little traces of Kieslowski in them.