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The result was a ten-part series for Polish television that occupies the opposite extreme from Charlton Heston's bathrobe blustering on Sinai. Each of the hour-long stories attends to one of the commandments as it pertains to different lives in a large high-rise apartment complex in Warsaw. Far from pious didacticism, the films display the tangled weight of the perennial moral-spiritual struggles that the commandments address.
The first, on "no other gods," is as wrenching as cinema gets. A father and son trust a computer to determine the thickness of the ice—to disastrous consequence—and the story ends, de profundis, in a church. In the second, on taking God's name in vain, a woman violinist asks an aging neighbor physician to determine if her seriously ill husband will die. The answer will dictate if she, pregnant by another man, will have an abortion. In number five, on killing, a young vagrant ineptly kills a taxi driver only to be executed efficiently, though just as coldly, by the state. The last, a dark comedy on coveting, follows two brothers after they discover that their newly dead father possessed an invaluable stamp collection.
And so they go, deft, incisive, and harrowing, disclosing what's at stake in the inescapable encounter with those trite-seeming epigrams on how the self should behave in a thorny, exigent world. As for God, well, the first ends in despair wrought of arrogance, the second in doubly new life and talk of miracle, and the last in the nothingness wrought of greed. And often hanging about is a mysterious silent "presence," a young (angelic?) stranger who quietly broods on the odd turns of this universe in microcosm.
Kieslowski's first international release, The Double Life of Veronique (1991), initiated the last phase of his career, one where theme and cinematic style entwine to explore overtly theological turf, although many academic critics dismiss this reading. The Double Life is a disquieting tale of two young women (Irene Jacob playing both), one in Poland and one in France, who not only share the same name but also, though they know nothing of one another, a vague awareness of the other's "presence."
The scenario seems canned and corny, the makings of a cooked-up horror tale—unless one is "in it," which is where Kieslowski puts us. Once there, he weaves a path into the shadowy bright depths of human connectedness and sacrifice. The Double Life suggests that in finding answers to the big questions about God and meaning, much depends on apprehending the import of amply cryptic "riddles, signs, portents, coincidences and sudden, odd strokes of fate."1 In Kieslowski's world, these omens beckon befogged humanity toward recognition that divine love summons all people to its embrace.
The Double Life seems a fit prolegomenon for Kieslowski's last major enterprise, his Three Colors trilogy. The colors in question are those of the French flag: white is equality, blue liberty, and red fraternity. In the majestic first film, Three Colors: Blue (1993), a young widow, Julie (Juliette Binoche), having lost her daughter and famous composer husband in an auto accident (so Kieslowski lost his mother), uses her new "freedom" to live without attachment, thought, and feeling. Until, that is, Julie begins at last to attend to the out-of-nowhere music which, like the voice of God, has regularly invaded her consciousness since the fatal accident. (The stunning score, like all of Kieslowski's music, is composed by Zbiegnew Priesner.)
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