MOVIES / Commentary : Thou Shalt Not Miss ‘Decalogue’ : It’s easy to see why Krzysztof Kieslowski’s rarely seen riff on the Ten Commandments has been likened to ‘Citizen Kane’

Some films are a pleasure to watch, some a duty, some (yes, it happens) an awful chore. But rarest of all are those films that are so accomplished, so overwhelming, so profound that seeing them on screen is nothing less than a privilege. Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “The Decalogue” is such an event.

“The Decalogue”--10 films based loosely on the Ten Commandments and originally made for Polish television--has been the talk of the film world since it premiered in full at the Venice Film Festival in 1989, winning acclaim as one of the indisputably great accomplishments of modern filmmaking.

But because the North American rights to the series are owned by a Canadian group whose terms for distribution domestic companies consider too stiff, “The Decalogue” is close to unknown in this country. It has never played commercially, it is unavailable on video, and even the times it has been shown at film festivals can be counted on one hand.

One of those was at 1990’s AFI Film Festival, and now Ken Wlaschin, the festival director, who is not alone in considering the series “the ‘Citizen Kane’ of our time,” has brought it back for this year’s event. No one who takes film at all seriously can have any excuse for missing it this time around.

Though the cumulative effect of all 10 films, which run about an hour each, is overpowering, each segment is completely self-contained and can easily be seen independently of the others. The AFI Festival has scheduled both afternoon and evening screenings for the series, with the first two films set for Tuesday and two each on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and next Sunday.

A member of the post-Andrzej Wajda generation of Polish directors that includes Krzysztof Zanussi and Jerzy Skolimowski, Kieslowski is best known in this country for his current “Three Colors” trilogy, with “Blue” premiering last year, “White” ( see accompanying story on actor Zbigniew Zamachowski) currently playing and “Red,” woefully overlooked by the Cannes Film Festival jury, scheduled to open in December.

The director first came to international notice when his darkly satirical 1979 “Camera Buff” won several international awards. He co-wrote “The Decalogue” with Krzysztof Piesiewicz and originally intended, he says, to have 10 different directors involved.

“But I liked doing the first film so much,” he told interviewer Annette Insdorf in 1990, “that I didn’t want to give the others away.” Using nine different cinematographers, he shot and edited the entire series in a remarkable 21 months: “Sometimes I’d shoot part of one film in the morning, part of a second in another location in the afternoon and a different one in the evening. That kept me from getting bored.”

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Though these films are based on the Ten Commandments, Kieslowski has delighted in making the connection oblique and difficult. The commandments are dealt with in order, but each film is identified only by its number, and nowhere in any of the films is the commandment in question explicitly referred to.

Yet, paradoxically, if there is one thing that sets “The Decalogue” apart, it is the ease with which it confronts the most serious questions of life, death, morality and belief. As much a rigorous scientist determined to explore human behavior in extremis as a creator of moral parables, Kieslowski places his characters in agonizing dilemmas, confronting them with problems that defy solution.

As compassionate as he is pessimistic, Kieslowski understands that when human needs are in conflict, life is devoid of easy choices. “Man doesn’t choose between good and evil” is how he’s put it in interviews. “He chooses between greater and lesser evil.”

Resolving problems, then, either tidily or otherwise, is far from the director’s concern. The exploration itself, the deep probing of psychological states in the hope of uncovering a sliver of illumination, “the contradiction,” in Kieslowski’s own words, “between complicated characters and simple stories,” is why “The Decalogue” was made and why it is so compelling and so powerful.

As emotionally lacerating as these despairing, ambiguous pieces can be, they never so much as flirt with pretension, and that is partially a result of Kieslowski’s absolute assurance as a director, his command of all the resources cinema has to offer.

Though Kieslowski used nine cinematographers, the director’s spare, minimal visual style dominates each episode. The camera work is at once so fluid and so precise that you fear to take your eyes from the screen, and the films are so packed with nuance and gesture that they seem to be feature length though they are not even close.

Kieslowski is helped greatly in his endeavor by the superb actors he has chosen for his cast, the best Polish cinema has to offer. All perform with exceptional restraint, and all, including the children who appear in some episodes, have faces that speak movingly even when words are absent.

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The stories, briefly encapsulated with the commandments they refer to, are as follows:

One--” I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other Gods before me. “ A rationalist father (Henryk Baranowski) and his devoted son (Wojciech Klata) share a passion for the father’s computer.

Two--” Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. “ A married woman (Krystyna Janda) pregnant by another man asks a doctor (Aleksander Bardini) whether her dying husband will live so she can decide if she needs to have an abortion.

Three--” Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. “ A married man (Daniel Olbrychski) has his Christmas Eve interrupted by his desperate former lover (Maria Pakulnis).

Four--” Honor thy father and thy mother. “ The relationship between a 20-year-old daughter (Adrianna Biedrzynska) and her father (Janus Gajos) powerfully changes when she reads a letter that was to have been opened only at his death.

Five--” Thou shalt not kill. “ The most celebrated film in the series was later expanded by the director to a feature known as “A Short Film About Killing,” which won several major European awards. A gloss on the nature of murder, both by the individual and by the state, it features one of the screen’s most graphic killings, spread out over more than seven minutes.

Six--” Thou shalt not commit adultery. “ Also was later expanded to a feature, called “A Short Film About Love.” The most overtly erotic of the group, it deals with a young peeping Tom (Olaf Lubaszenko) who falls desperately in love with the woman he spies on (Grazyna Szapolowska).

Seven--” Thou shalt not steal. “ A wrenching story of Majka, a young woman (Maja Barelkowska) who has allowed her mother (Ana Polony) to pretend that Majka’s daughter is her own.

Eight--” Thou shalt not bear false witness. “ A professor of ethics who survived the Nazi occupation (Maria Koscialkowska) is confronted about her past by a young American student (Teresa Marczewska).

Nine--” Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. “ An impotent husband (Piotr Machalica) fears that his wife (Ewa Blaszczyk) is having an affair.

Ten--” Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods. “ The only even remotely comic episode, though a very dark comedy it is, details what happens when two brothers (Zbigniew Zamachowski and Jerzy Stuhr) discover that their dead father had the most valuable stamp collection in Poland.

Aside from Kieslowski’s themes and his skill, a key factor unifying these stories is the somber score by veteran collaborator Zbigniew Preisner. Best known for his work on both “Blue” and “The Double Life of Veronique,” Preisner here has come in almost on tiptoe, choosing a minimal musical mode that haunts each part of the series.

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More prosaically, “The Decalogue” is also united by its site, an anonymous Warsaw apartment complex where all its protagonists live. Similarly, though he doesn’t like to explain why, Kieslowski places the same watchful character in almost every episode, someone whose silent presence seems to be saying something just beyond our understanding.

Just before “Red,” Kieslowski’s most recent film, was released, the 53-year-old director announced that it would be his last, a decision he reiterated at Cannes.

He has a country house, he told the French daily Le Figaro, where “there is a veranda and a chair. I’ll have lots of books, lots of cigarettes, lots of coffee. Don’t you sometimes dream of the same thing?”

Those who see even a part of “The Decalogue,” however, will have another dream, that this supremely gifted director returns to film as soon as possible.