Dekalog II

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.