Film Analysis: Kieslowski - Movie Review Example

The moral and social themes of the ten commandments are played out in the ordinary lives of ordinary citizens.The films of the Decalogue are filled with atmospheric shots of the interiors of individual flats, and of bleak cityscapes in which the humans are dwarfed by multi-story buildings. A Western European or American audience is immediately struck by the relatively primitive furnishings of the living arrangements and the worn-down and worried population who live there. Characters are presented with all their faults on show, and there is a deliberate focus on illness and physical imperfections.

Clothing is grubby, hands are arthritic and disfigured as if to emphasize the harshness of the human condition. Minutes can go by, with nothing much happening, no dialogue, and just a series of domestic interiors being captured frame by frame. The characters reveal their natures in simple actions like walking down an empty road or drinking tea in a neighbor’s kitchen. If ever there was a film series to exemplify Durkheim’s theories of social conditioning, then this is it.The films are not pretty, in the sense that Hollywood films are, but what makes the films interesting, is to see the way that these downtrodden human beings exercise their free will to interact with others and resolve moral conflicts in a way that transcends their drab surroundings.

While the communist day to reality insists on a pure materialist perspective, without any divine intervention, or any hope of heaven or fear of hell, the people who feature in these films, for example, the doctor in Decalogue 2, find themselves in situations where a purely rational process does not bring any clarity to moral dilemmas.