Dekalog, jeden (TV)

In the whole Dekalog series, and most impressively in its very first episode, Kieślowski again tackles the spiritual quest of mankind without invoking the necessity of religions, or even that of gods. The quest that is the result of human curiosity: that seeks to define and predict, that seeks to know instead of not know, and yet that finally knows more in knowing that not everything is to be, or can be, known. Lit up by a wonderful relationship between the precocious father-son duo of Pawel and Krzysztof, seldom seen in most cultures' films, the film finds easily a way into your heart and lodges there for ever. Maybe, that's a fault to contend with: in a film which conveys a deeply philosophical message, there is more sentimentality than many would usually like. But a sentimentality of the warm kind, of the intelligent kind: as if the bonding, both of love and of intelligence, between Pawel and Krzysztof is like the soft feathery flocons of snow that dreamily fall, defying meteorologists and the most accurate machines.

Systematically, as he would do in all his films, Kieślowski will be obsessed with the point of the view of the absent, of that that would have happened (had ...), of the irrealisable. Little shots throughout the Dekalog series, and throughout the master's oeuvre, will time and again remind the viewer: that the perception of the same event, the same circumstance can be different from the other side of the window, from outside, from another's eyes, from another world. And what if the circumstances had changed? Charts of destiny are again the drifting flocons of snow: and nothing can be predicted, nothing can be established as one definitive truth or good, and no theory or science or religion can be cherished as God save the actual love for and by Pawel. It is Love that says "I am Lord thy God, and thou shalt not have no other gods but Me." Only, it doesn't say (so, or anything): it is silent and pervasive.