Ann Lee believed she had connected with God. The connection was so powerful that she came to see herself as the second coming of Christ. She believed it strongly enough that others did too. Around six thousand of them, in fact. Everyone else either ignored her or tried to persecute her, denouncing her as a witch.
In short, that is the story of Ann Lee. It's interesting, but not interesting enough to sustain a two-hour film. She did not really begin her movement until her mid-twenties and was dead by her mid-forties. Ninety minutes would have been the better runtime.
I would argue that the real testament here is to the DP, William Rexer. His oeuvre includes what appear to be some fairly terrible films, among them The Accidental Husband, Friends with Kids and I Think I Love My Wife. Yet here, in this film about Ann Lee, our boy absolutely crushes it. The film is full of beautiful shots. Whether that comes down to Mona Fastvold’s influence, or whether he arrived there on his own, we will never know.
To be fair, this is not a film made up entirely of perfect shots. Few films are. But it is full of memorable ones.
This one, for instance, reminds me of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World.
Here, there is tremendous energy.
The staging in this scene is excellent.
Here too, the staging is wonderful.
And then there are the chapter breakers. We cannot credit those to William Rexer with any certainty, but we can say they are super cool.
A supernatural horror film with a dag as the protagonist? Yeah, I have time for that.
Good Boy follows Indy, a dog trying to save his owner from a supernatural presence lurking in his late grandfather’s rural home. The man suffers from chronic lung disease, and the film makes it fairly clear that this presence is death itself, coming to claim him by way of cancer.
There is not a huge amount to say about the plot. What makes the film work is the execution. A setup like this could very easily tip into something forced or silly, but it never does. Indy carries the whole thing without a false note. God knows how many takes it took to get that right. Indy must be one hell of a well-trained dog.
We’ve made it to the final installment. Dekalog X deals with the tenth commandment: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods. Though, in this case, the goods do also get stolen.
The episode begins at a concert. Punk rockers City Death are mid-set when the lead singer, Artur’s “normy” brother, Jerzy, barges through the crowd to announce that their father has died. Why he couldn’t wait until the end of the set is beyond me.
After the funeral, the brothers visit their father’s heavily secured ramshackle apartment. It is a strange setup. The place is only one step above a solitary confinement cell, yet it has an alarm system, nailed-shut windows, and a huge set of cabinets kept under lock, chain and key. Inside is an enormous stamp collection. The brothers barely knew their father and knew nothing about it.
As they try to understand the collection, a few collectors attempt to dupe them. The brothers catch on and become protective of what they have. One of their father’s friends drops by and explains that their father wanted to insure the collection for 250 million zloty, around $63 million today, and God knows how much back then. On his way out, he makes a paggro remark about the boys being absent sons.
The brothers become fixated on two rare stamps in their father’s collection. He does not own the third matching stamp, which, according to notes he left behind, is incredibly hard to find. Lo and behold, one of the collectors who tried to dupe them earlier has it. He is even willing to trade. Not for other stamps, but for a kidney. WTF.
It turns out this scheming fella’s daughter needs a kidney transplant, and Jerzy is a match. The boys must really want that stamp, because Jerzy goes into hospital to have the kidney removed. And they do get the stamp. But while Jerzy is recovering and Artur is waiting, thieves break into their father’s apartment and clean out the entire collection.
The brothers are heartbroken. At first they suspect one another, but that passes. They never recover the collection, but they do begin collecting on their own, and they seem to bond over it.
One thing I love about this installment is the contrast between the brothers. One is in a punk rock band and looks the part. The other looks like a middle manager in an accountancy firm. Chalk and cheese. This is how families really are. Also, while City Death sucks, I like that a few scenes are set at shows. I grew up playing in the punk and hardcore scene in New York. Much of the music sucked in retrospect too, but that time mattered to me.
It is sad that the brothers hardly know their father, and that their own lives seem to have pulled them apart as well. Still, they come together in the end, which leaves you hoping they might stay in touch.
The penultimate installment of Dekalog explores the ninth commandment: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife.
Our protagonist, Dr. Roman Nycz, has been diagnosed with impotence. It had never occurred to me that this is something one gets formally diagnosed with. I assumed you would just know. In any case, his friend and colleague confirms the prognosis, then makes the bone-headed suggestion that Roman should divorce his wife, Hanka. What kind of advice is that?
Roman and Hanka love one another and want to stick it out, even if there won’t be any sticking in. There is more to love than sex. Still reeling, Roman says he would not begrudge Hanka if she found another lover. She refuses, and the two leave it there.
It turns out Hanka already has a lover: a little pip-squeak named Mariusz. Roman clocks it, grows jealous and starts spying on her. Amid the escalating tension and guilt at home, Hanka decides to end the affair. She does this at her mother’s house, which doubles as their secret shag shack. Mariusz takes it badly. Hanka throws him out, only to discover Roman hidden in the closet. In that moment, she realises he saw everything and has known about her infidelity all along.
They agree to work through it. Their, erm, solution includes plans to adopt a child. Before that can happen, Roman sends Hanka away for a little rest and relaxation on a solo ski trip. Unbeknownst to her, Mariusz finds out and follows her there. Roman learns this, assumes it was coordinated, and rides his bicycle off a bridge in an attempt to kill himself. It is a pretty low bridge, and he lands in a pile of dirt. It looks like he should come away with little more than bruises, yet he ends up in hospital wrapped in what appears to be a full-body cast.
Eventually, the staff tell Roman that Hanka had called earlier to say she was returning from her trip. The two reconnect by telephone and reunite.
Dekalog IX deals in painfully intimate material, and for long stretches it lands. You feel for Roman. Any man rendered impotent, especially while still fairly young, would likely feel diminished. The episode taps into that humiliation that follows when love, sex and self-worth feel inseparable.
It misses the mark a few times though. Roman’s doctor friend is absurdly callous, and Roman’s suicide attempt has something adolescent about it. But that may be the point. Kieślowski is showing us a man whose pride has been blown up, and who responds with regression.
There are also a handful of great shots in Dekalog IX. My favourite comes in an elevator. Roman and Hanka are talking, and as the elevator rises, the light illuminates only one of them at a time. It called to mind the elevator scene from one of the earlier episodes. It is a simple device, but an effective one: even when they occupy the same small space, they remain cut off from one another, each briefly visible, then obscured again.
I’ve reached the seventh commandment: Thou shalt not steal. Kieślowski asks us to consider what stealing really is. Straightforward, right? You take something that doesn’t belong to you without permission. But here he blurs the line.
The backstory to Dekalog VII is that Ewa, the mother of 22-year-old Majka, was the headmistress of a school where she hired a literature professor, Wojtek. Wojtek met and seduced Majka when she was 16. She got pregnant and had a daughter, Ania. But because of the “scandal” of it all, Majka was forced to pretend that Ania was actually her little sister.
We learn all of this through the action. In short, Majka kidnaps her own daughter, Ania. Later, she tells her mother, Ewa, that she robbed her of motherhood.
Now, we don’t know whether the 16-year-old Majka wanted to be a mother in any real sense. And we cannot say with certainty that Ewa stole motherhood from her in some simple, clean way. That is what makes the episode unsettling. No one here is innocent, but no one is entirely wrong either.
Kieślowski turns the commandment inside out. Stealing is not just about property. It can also mean taking someone’s place, their language for reality or the right to name what is theirs.
The sixth installment of Dekalog explores the commandment thou shalt not commit adultery. While the Commandment typically refers to breaking a marriage, Dekalog VI challenges that by showing how casual sex and the inability to form genuine emotional bonds can be just as destructive as adultery.
In short, a naive teenager called Tomek spies on a woman called Magda in an adjacent building. Through the lens of his telescope, Tomek falls in love with Magda who has a revolving door of suitors pass through for sex. Tomek frequently calls Magda and breathes into the phone. He interrupts her sexual adventures, in one instance calling in a false gas leak. Tomek also steals her mail. A wee bit creepy, but okay.
Tomek wants to meet Magda, and he takes an extra job delivering milk to her apartment block. Magda goes to the post office to collect a note that Tomek sent her and is accused by the office manager of trying to rob the office by presenting false notes. Magda storms out of the post office; Tomek follows her and confesses to his peeping. She becomes angry.
Further along in the story Tomek he declares his love to Magda. After inquiring as to what he wants from her, which he cannot answer, she accepts a date to have ice cream. Magda brings Tomek to her apartment for a little bit of whoopee but Tomek pops his cork after touching her leg. He then storms home and slits his wrists. A bit extreme. He recovers in the hospital. Tomek and Magda meet again at the post office. He tells her that he isn’t spying anymore.
Removing the commandment as a throughline, this installment was simply about the nature and consequences of love. Tomek and Magda had different ideas on love. He was young and naive, she was jaded and cynical.
I’m halfway through the Dekalog series. Put another way, I made it through the fifth commandment: Thou shalt not kill.
In Dekalog V, a young drifter murders a taxi driver. They haven’t met before. There’s no motive. The drifter simply wants to kill. The episode follows two threads. In one, we follow the drifter throughout the day on which he commits the murder. In the other, we listen to the defense attorney prepare to defend the drifter in court. The drifter is ultimately convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. The hanging is fast and brutal.
Dekalog V reflects Kieślowski’s opposition to the death penalty. He later released an extended version of this episode titled A Short Film About Killing. The film was released at a time when debate had arisen in Poland about the death penalty and is believed to have influenced public discourse on the topic.
The film explores the fifth commandment in two ways. The first is through the senseless murder of an individual. The second is through the state’s execution of a murderer. We all agree that the first is wrong. What about the second? Can the state justify killing a killer, or is that just another form of murder? It’s the only episode of Dekalog that seems to take a stance.
We know how Kieślowski feels. What does the angel make of it?
A drama student called Anka lives with her father Michał.
While Michał is away on business, Anka finds an envelope meant to be opened after his death. She had known about this envelope for years. Michał usually brings it with him on business trips. This time he left it behind.
After a couple of days, she finally opens the envelope. Inside, there is another envelope with a short message from her mother, who died when she was a child. The envelope says, “To my daughter, Anka.” She wonders whether to open it.
When Anka picks her father up from the airport later on, she tells him that she read the letter and that it reveals Michał is not her father. Oh shit! This shakes their relationship and brings out complicated feelings between them, which is precisely where this installment gets weird.
Michał says he suspected it all along but never knew for sure. It didn’t matter to him. Anka was always his daughter. Anka makes it weird, though, dialing up the sexual tension between them. She tells Michał that her first sexual experience felt like a betrayal of him. The tension peaks when Anka disrobes and tries to seduce Michał, who covers her up. Good lad.
Later, Anka admits she never opened the real letter. She made up her own version instead. Because she’s crazy, of course. When they burn the real letter, they glimpse a few words that suggest her fake letter may have been close to the truth.
Thematically, this aligns with the fourth commandment, honor thy father and thy mother. Anka didn’t seem to honor Michał, real or not, by opening the letter and later trying to seduce him. Nor did she honor her mother by burning the letter, which she clearly felt was important for her daughter.
Two things stood out in this installment. The first is a conversation that takes place in an elevator. In a moment of tension, Anka and Michał have a conversation in the elevator as it goes up and down, letting people on and off. It’s a short scene, but still long enough to be interesting. It’s exactly the sort of thing you would see in a French New Wave film.
The second thing that stood out is the angel or silent judge. In every installment, there’s one random guy who observes or makes eye contact with the protagonist at a moment when they are making an important decision. In the first installment, it’s the man beside the lake when the father decides the ice is strong enough for his son to skate. In the second, it’s the man who watches as the wife decides her husband will not wake from his condition and that she should keep the baby conceived with his friend. In the third, it’s the tram driver when the couple drive straight towards it on the tracks.
The same actor plays this character in each episode. When I watched the first installment, I wondered whether this character was God. After a bit of research, I believe he’s meant to be an angel. In Dekalog IV, he appears carrying a canoe.
The sexual tension makes Dekalog IV weird. It’s my least favorite of the collection thus far.
The Hourglass Sanatorium feels like an acid trip within a dream. It starts with a straightforward premise: a man visits his father in a mystical sanatorium where time does not behave normally. Within twenty minutes, we enter an incomprehensible dreamscape.
A bit of reading suggests the film is true to Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, the collection of dreamlike, poetic short stories that inspired it. Accurate or not, any semblance of a plot quickly falls apart. If plot matters to you, this film is unwatchable.
So why finish it?
It’s beautiful and bizarre in equal measure. Wojciech Jerzy Has and the army of people who worked on this film created a sequence of visually stunning scenes that play out on elaborate sets. I stopped reading the subtitles around halfway through the film and focused on the visuals instead. It was worth watching for that alone.
What is it about Bob Dylan? He was not an extraordinary guitarist. His voice was rough at best. He overused the harmonica. His songs ran long. And by most accounts, he was a prick. Despite all of that, he wrote great songs. He remains a mystery.
Timothée Chalamet captures that mystery in A Complete Unknown. Another excellent performance. He nails Dylan’s moody silences and self-serving streak. He also sings and plays the songs himself. It is today’s great actor playing yesterday’s great songwriter.
I don’t have much more to add. It is worth watching.
One moment that stood out was the contrast between Dylan’s early and late visits to Woody Guthrie in the hospital. The first time, Dylan is timid, almost reverent. He plays a song and earns Guthrie’s respect. By the end, hardened and already playing electric guitar, he returns to pay his dues. Guthrie presses his harmonica into Dylan’s hand for safekeeping. A quiet passing of the baton from one of folk’s forefathers to the man who would reshape it. A nice touch.
What ultimately defines Dylan is that he always did his own thing. That’s rare in a person.
Life’s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.
That line from Thomas Pynchon’s V. captures the narrative throughline of Blind Chance, the latest film in my Kieślowski retrospective. The film presents three separate versions of a medical student named Witek running after a train, and how that ordinary moment might shape the rest of his life.
All three storylines begin in the same place. Witek abandons his calling as a medical student after learning of his father’s death. For reasons not fully explained, he decides to take a train to Warsaw. He is late. He runs for the departing train. That’s where the different storylines emerge.
In the first version, Witek catches the train and becomes a communist functionary. In the second, he misses it and collides with a security guard on the platform. The authorities detain him, and he drifts toward the resistance movement. In the third, he misses both the train and the guard. On the platform he reconnects with Olga, the woman he has been dating. They return to his apartment and make the sex! Olga becomes pregnant. They decide to get married. Witek completes his studies and becomes a doctor.
I was not prepared for the opening. The film begins with Witek on an airplane, screaming. We do not understand why until the final moments. A few intense scenes follow. We see a bloodied body dragged down a hospital corridor after his birth. A childhood friend departs, only to resurface later. There is the clinical opening of an elderly woman’s body in medical school. Paired with the score, it made for intense viewing on what I had hoped would be a quiet Friday night. The film settles after that.
A few things stood out.
First, the train. Each time Witek runs for it, tiny details determine whether he makes it. The distinctions are subtle. I only noticed them when I went back to rewatch those scenes. The attention to detail impressed me.
Second, several scenes are shot as if the characters are speaking directly to someone just off camera. At first it feels like a point-of-view conversation. Those moments pulled me in.
Third, in the final storyline, Witek makes a house call to see an elderly patient. As he leaves, he notices two people performing a strange juggling routine. He asks why they do it. There is no explanation, they simply do. That evening, Witek attempts to juggle apples in his kitchen and fails. It’s a small, human moment.
Overall, I enjoyed the film. Many of the political nuances likely escaped me. Still, the central idea endures: the smallest turn of timing can alter a life without our awareness. It left me wondering how often chance has shaped my life.
Orson Welles did better work earlier in his career. Several things about The Lady from Shanghai grated on me: Welles’ Irish accent, the stilted dialogue, the endless shots of Rita Hayworth gazing into the distance, the absurd courtroom scene. And then there’s the aquarium scene, complete with a wildly out-of-proportion turtle and eel. It's still.
It’s not all bad. Rita Hayworth owns her sailing outfit. We need to bring that look to city streets around the world immediately.
Rita also knows how to handle a gun. Marilyn might have pulled off the nautical chic, but only Rita could point the revolver.
Still, look at the size of that eel. What were they thinking?
Dekalog III tackles the least dramatic of the commandments: Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Yet Kieślowski still manages to turn it into something devastating.
The story unfolds on Christmas Eve. After attending midnight mass and playing Santa Claus for his children, a taxi driver named Janusz answers the door to find his former lover, Ewa. She claims her husband has gone missing and asks Janusz to help search for him. Janusz tells his wife his taxi has been stolen and heads out into the night with Ewa.
They wander through Warsaw chasing fragments of a story that never adds up. Janusz grows increasingly eager to return home, but Ewa keeps him close by planting small clues and prolonging the search. Eventually, Janusz understands that something is wrong but says nothing.
At seven the next morning, Ewa confesses. She is no longer married. Her husband left after her affair with Janusz and has built a new life. The search was a fabrication. She had devised a private ritual: If she could keep Janusz away from his family until seven, something might be restored. If she failed, she planned to kill herself.
Intellectually, this episode feels thinner than the first two. Emotionally, it cuts deep because of its portrait of loneliness. Ewa reaches out to Janusz because she cannot bear being alone. Early on, when her senile aunt asks after her husband, the emptiness is visible in her eyes. In her apartment, the razor and other belongings left behind by her husband years earlier underscore her loneliness. The deserted Warsaw streets amplify the isolation.
Janusz is lonely in his own way. He notices the cracks in Ewa’s story yet stays with her. He claims to want his family, but spends the sacred hours of the night elsewhere. Perhaps temptation offers a brief escape from routine.
Even Janusz’s wife carries her own loneliness. We see her only briefly, but it’s enough. She does not believe the taxi has been stolen, yet she lets Janusz go. When he returns, she asks whether he will spend the rest of the night with Ewa again. There is loneliness in her knowledge of what happened before.
One of the most harrowing moments comes when Janusz drives directly toward an oncoming tram, swerving at the last second. Ewa wants the crash to happen. I wonder how many people carry that same feeling.
Wim Wenders loves Yasujirō Ozu. He loves Ozu’s films so much that he travelled to Japan in search of the Tokyo Ozu captured on screen. The city he found disappointed him. That search and that disappointment form the backbone of Tokyo-Ga.
Filmed in 1983, the documentary moves between Wenders’ reflections on Japan and interviews with people who worked with Ozu. I don’t agree with all of Wenders’ observations, but his curiosity is compelling and the footage is extraordinary. Tokyo in its prime; what a place to be.
Wenders watches the making of shokuhin sampuru (食品サンプル), the hyper-real food replicas displayed outside restaurants. He spends long stretches inside pachinko parlours, watching players and observing technicians service the machines after closing time. There’s also a wonderful sequence at the Rockabilly Club. It’s striking to see people dancing near Yoyogi Park around the time I was born, and to remember that nearly thirty years later, when I lived there, others were doing exactly the same thing.
While in Tokyo, Wenders meets Werner Herzog. He also encounters Chris Marker in a bar called La Jetée, named after Marker’s photo roman. Marker released his own documentary called Sans Soleil that year, with passages shot in Tokyo.
The least visually dynamic sections are the most affecting: conversations with an aging actor who appeared in Ozu’s films and, later, with one of Ozu’s cameramen. Time has rendered the actor anonymous; no one recognizes him anymore. It’s a blunt reminder that we all fade. The cameraman eventually breaks down in tears as he describes how deeply Ozu shaped his life. If only we could leave that kind of mark on the people around us.
Tokyo-Ga works because of Tokyo itself. Set in any other city, it would lose much of its power.
Where some broach their life problems in private with a therapist, Woody Allen navigates his in public. The movie set replaces the analyst’s couch. Through his characters, he stages his own self-examination, amusing us while trying to understand himself.
As my wife pointed out, Allen’s films often revolve around atypical romantic relationships. They feel like long, single-episode sitcoms elevated by wit and larger budgets. Yet beneath the humor lies something more confessional.
In Manhattan, Allen’s 42-year-old character drifts between a 17-year-old girl and his friend’s former mistress. In Hannah and Her Sisters, one narrative current follows Hannah’s husband as he falls in love with and pursues one of her sisters. In both films, the relationships prove fleeting. Yet Allen allows his characters to pursue them anyway, as if testing whether forbidden fruit really is sweeter. Watching now, it is hard not to wonder whether these public explorations doubled as private rehearsal for his personal life.
For a filmmaker so dependent on dialogue, it is striking how much weight his rare silences carry. Someone is always talking in Allen’s films. Yet in brief moments of stillness, the self-reflection lands harder than any monologue. In those pauses, we glimpse insecurity.
Near the end of the film, two characters run into each other in a record store. Earlier in the year, they endured a terrible date. Now they sift through albums, joke about the evening and tentatively reconnect. Nothing dramatic happens. They simply talk. For Allen, conversation is both the problem and the solution.
Perhaps that is the through line of Allen’s approach to life. It’s easy to imagine coming to Allen with your own problem. Sit down, he’d say. Let’s talk about it. The question is whether you would get a word in edgewise.
Marty Mauser will lie to you. Marty Mauser will steal from you. Marty Mauser will insult you. Marty Mauser will deny you. Marty Mauser will do whatever it takes to get what he wants because there’s only one thing that he cares about: Marty Mauser.
Set in the 1950s, Marty Supreme explores Western individualism and American exceptionalism through Marty Mauser’s relentless quest to become a table tennis world champion. In the process, he takes advantage of anyone within reach. When times get tough, he abases himself as long as it brings him closer to his goal.
It’s hard to like Marty. And yet beneath the bravado there’s something magnetic about Marty. He’s sure of himself in a way most of never are. His self-conviction borders on narcissism, but it also propels him towards success. The film leaves you wondering whether that kind of belief is admirable, corrosive or simply necessary.
Josh Safdie directs Marty Supreme with his hallmark pacing. And Timothée Chalamet cements his position as one of the most talented actors working today. The result is deeply watchable.
The second commandment states: Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. A literal reading forbids using God’s name in a way that is wicked, empty or self-serving. The clearest interpretation I’ve encountered is that it warns against misleading others.
Dekalog II explores this commandment through an elderly hospital doctor and a woman in her thirties. Her husband is gravely ill. She wants a definitive prognosis. The doctor refuses to give one.
She confronts the doctor at his apartment. She is pregnant. Her husband’s friend is the father. She plans to keep the baby if her husband dies and to abort it if he survives. She presses the doctor for certainty, placing the weight of her decision on his shoulders.
At the end of their conversation, she crushes her cigarette into a box of matches. The matches flare. The flame mirrors both her urgent need for an answer and the burden now transferred to the doctor. A life may depend on what he says.
The next day, the doctor reviews tissue samples in the hospital lab. The results suggest her husband will not recover. He tells her as much. She decides to keep the child. That evening, we see the doctor framed in his apartment window, bathed in a red glow reminiscent of the earlier flame.
Unexpectedly, the husband awakens the next day. He watches a bee climb up a spoon resting in a glass of preserved strawberries. He thanks the doctor for his care and shares joyful news: he is going to be a father.
In trying to guide the woman, the doctor has misled her. Now she must mislead her husband, raising a child that is not his as if it were.
Subtle visual motifs carry the moral tension forward. It is another strong installment, though I still prefer Dekalog I.
Pope John XXIII established the Vatican Film Library in 1959. He sought to preserve films and recorded television programs on the life of the Catholic Church. You know, Christmas mass and home videos of the archbishops dancing in sprinklers during the summer holidays.
Fast forward to 1995. By this time the archive has over 8,000 films. The collection moved from home videos to cinematic masterpieces. Popes enjoy film, too. In fact they enjoy it so much that, under the guidance of Pope John Paul II and cardinal John Patrick Foley, the Vatican Pontifical Council for Social Communications released a list of 45 films titled Some Important Films (alcuni film importanti) in honor of the 100th anniversary of the first moving picture. The holy cinephiles grouped the films into three categories based on what the Vatican perceived to be their merits: Art, Religion and Values.
Dekalog made the list for its values.
Hailed as Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece, Dekalog explores the ten commandments across a series of one-hour films. All ten films take place in the same austere Polish housing project, yet each consists of different characters and can be watched independently of the rest.
Dekalog I reflects the first commandment: I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not have other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.
We watch a precocious boy, Pawel, navigate questions of fate through conversations with his father and his aunt. Pawel’s father, an academic who teaches at the university, leans towards a scientific explanation of the world. At home, he bonds with Pawel over computers, solving equations. The computer always knows. Pawel’s father puts his faith in machines.
When Pawel relays his father’s views to his aunt, she speaks of religion and the soul. Yet the nature of her faith shines more clearly in front of the computer. Pawel has created a program that allows him to know what his mother is doing. While never stated, it seems she’s living abroad as the program calculates time zone differences. Each time Pawel asks what his mother is doing, the computer fails to answer. The computer doesn’t always know. Yet Pawel’s aunt answers without hesitation: She’s dreaming of you. She puts her faith in what can only be known in the heart. That includes God.
Further along in the story, Pawel receives ice skates from his father. Ecstatic, Pawel asks if he can skate on the lake the next day. His father calculates how much weight the ice can support; three times the boy’s weight. Still, Pawel’s father walks out to the lake himself to test the ice—perhaps a sign he has not put all of his faith in the machine. The next day, Pawel skates on the lake with friends. The ice cracks, and Pawel drowns in the frigid waters.
Here we’re invited to reflect on the first commandment. I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not have other gods before me. Even if the machine god provided correct calculations, the Biblical God had other plans.
If this is a story about false gods, then we are left with a harder question: where is the real one? Kieślowski may offer an answer in the form of a mysterious character who makes three brief appearances.
At the beginning of the film, a blue-eyed man sits beside the frozen lake, observing the ice in silence while warming himself against the winter before a small fire. We see this man a second time when Pawel’s father tests the strength of the ice. When Pawel dies, we see the man a third time though not physically; while rescuers retrieve bodies from the lake, we notice a black pile of smoldering ash where the man sat before.
I interpret this man to be God. His screaming absence in the face of tragedy raises the timeless question that every religious skeptic asks: How can God let something so horrible happen? Surely this man could have helped if he were there when the ice cracked. What God wouldn’t help given the chance. Yet, if he wasn’t there, why not? Was he even there to begin with?
The mysterious man is but one of several symbolic visuals that Kieślowski employs. Another fantastic example comes while Pawel’s father is grading assignments. A pot of blue ink begins to leak, spilling deep blue puddles across white pages spread across the desk. This happens around the same time Pawel is out skating on the lake and, presumably, at the same time that the ice cracks.
Kieślowski quickly deepens the visual metaphor. We all know what it means to say someone has blood on their hands. Scholars tie the idiom to the Old Testament. In Deuteronomy 21:6-9, elders wash their hands to declare they are not responsible for a death. Isaiah 59:3 also mentions hands stained with blood as a sign of guilt. In Dekalog I, Pawel’s father runs to the sink to wash blue ink from his hands. Here we might say he has blue on his hands, yet the meaning is the same.
Dekalog I hits hard. Kieślowski turns serious religious material into a harrowing story about faith and the nature of God. It calls to mind the final passage in Thornton Wilder’s The Eighth Day: There is much talk of a design in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. Some are strengthened by seeing a pattern wherein the oppressed and exploited of the earth are gradually emerging from their bondage. Some find strength in the conviction that there is nothing to see. Some
Wilder ends with a single word without a full stop. Kieślowski ends with a full stop and leaves you to imagine Pawel’s father searching the arras to understand why his God failed him.
Cecilia has it rough. She is a terrible waitress. Her husband is abusive and unfaithful. All she wants is escape. So she goes to the cinema to watch The Purple Rose of Cairo again and again. She falls in love with Tom Baxter, the character on screen. By some magic, Tom falls in love with her, too, and steps out of the film into real life.
What begins as fantasy quickly gets complicated. Without Tom, the movie starts losing money, putting the actor who plays him, Gil Shepherd, at risk. Gil tracks Cecilia down and he also falls for her. Now, Cecilia must choose between the fantasy who cannot survive in the real world and the actor who can.
The film works on an acute psychological level. Cecilia projects her longing onto the screen. Tom embodies the romance she imagines, but he's confined by the script that created him. He cannot adapt. Gil is real. He can improvise, promise, betray. He is the closest thing to Tom that reality can offer, and that's the problem, because real people disappoint.
In the end, Cecilia returns to the cinema. The desire for escape remains. It always does.
New York looks best in black and white. In few films is that more evident than Manhattan. Woody Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis capture a version of the city that feels familiar, even to those who have never visited.
In this film, New York is a central character. It shapes the characters. Their romances, betrayals and anxieties all feel possible only here. Watching, we imagine ourselves there too, living out our own little dramas.
The film opens and closes with sweeping shots of the city. In between, Allen and Willis linger on bridges, sidewalks, restaurants and streets that feel iconic even if you could not name them.
The most unforgettable image may be the sunrise shot of the Queensboro Bridge. Captured at five in the morning, the production team had to bring its own bench because none existed at the location. The scene feels accidental and perfectly composed at the same time, just like New York.
