User Reviews

This is the episode that probably most closely relates to it's partner law, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," in that it directly brings up the ever controversial issue, "Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing is wrong?" This issue is presented in two parts within the episode: before the killing, when the film shows the dichotomy between the idealistic up-and-coming lawyer and the street thug so caught up in his ways that his life is merely a representation of what he's supposed to do, followed by the period after the trial and before the execution, when both are made to suffer for the deaths they feel responsible for and thus share.

One of the great things about the way these episodes work are in the both small and big ways the story is fully developed, so that we understand both the motivations and histories of characters we're only able to spend slightly less than an hour with. For all his criminal intentions and mockery, the killer is still very sympathetic, revolving the most important part of his actions around a history of accidental death. His way of killing is more a desire to control death than it is any desire to actually destroy. Similarly, the lawyer's idealistic naivety shows one unwilling to allow death to happen in a world where he can't control it. Their meeting is, indeed, important; they both have to give in to it while not propagating it.

As an aside, it's interesting how much this episode affects viewing of Rouge, Kieslowski's later completion of the Trois Colours trilogy. One of Kieslowski's biggest influences seems to be the idea of justice, and considering that the Decalogue is a meditation on something that represents Divine Justice, this one seems almost the most self-conscious.

--PolarisDiB

Having seen the full length film Kieslowski made out of this episode of "The Decalogue" years ago, came back to this viewer as we watched the complete ten vignettes. As with the other films, this one is loosely based on the fifth commandment, or, "Thou shalt not kill".

Kryzsztof Kieslowski, writing with Kryzsztof Piesewicz, took a look at the mind of a young man who commits a heinous crime in murdering an innocent person to vent his own frustrations. This installment has a Dostoyevskian character that kept reminding us about "Crime and Punishment", or at least some of the qualities of the novel are passed to the aimless youth who apparently has no redeeming qualities.

The story shows the young man as he roams the streets of the city without a clear idea of what to do, or where to go. The only tender moment he displays is when he visits the photographer's place to ask to have an old picture of his sister restored. Kieslowski leaves it up to fate to have the murderer board a taxi with the intention of robbing the driver, but it's his anger and frustration that get the best of this youth to kill a man that didn't deserve to die. The last moments of this criminal is one of the most gripping sequences in any film, past, or present.

The other element in the story is the relationship between the public defendant and the criminal. Nothing can prevent the court to condemn to death the young man. The lawyer feels at the end he has failed his client and goes to the judge to see where he went wrong. All he is asked by the young man is to retrieve the picture and send it to his mother.

Kieslowski's account of how he interprets the fifth commandment makes for a surprising film that will stay in the viewer's mind long after this episode is forgotten.

The Dekalog 5 may be considered a violent accusation against the death sentence, according to the fifth commandment "Thou shalt not kill": not by chance it puts the concept of a State fully complied with the provisions of an unjust law on the same plane as the figure of a Murderer. "But the law might not imitate the nature, it might correct it," states Piotr, the counsel for the defense, a real catalyst character, "the punishment is a form of vengeance aiming at returning evil for evil without preventing the crime. But in the name of whom the law takes its revenge? Really in the name of the innocent ones?". The horrifying and detailed sequences of the last half hour of a man sentenced to death give value to the uselessness of the deterrent function applied to the death penalty with the purpose of intimidating all potential criminals. "Desperate plights don't demand desperate remedies", Kieslowski says in his message, teaching us how unrighteous can be the act of disobedience to a commandment of God that judges punishment the same way as crime is judged. There are three different moral attitudes here: the innate sense of rebellion of the MURDERER aiming at rousing the hostile torpor of the surrounding environment; the strong sense of chronic indifference of the VICTIM inclined to laugh at other people's requirements; the deserving behavior of the COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE always ready to fight against adversity, in favor of human life. The struggle for life is ruthlessly vivisected all of the time; the characters are plunged into scenes of affliction and distress, in an urban landscape accented with greenish tones and seen in its own reflections through the windshield of a taxi. Everything in "Dekalog 5" conveys a dreadful sense of estrangement and isolation: descriptions of a waste undergrowth of violence and folly, scenes of precarious conditions of work, sinister appearances of buildings immersed in an anonymous aura of desolation, aimless wanderings through disenchanting environments. Jazek, the main character, is compelled to struggle with an opponent stronger than himself: a town completely wrapped in profound indifference, apparently hostile, deaf to all his mute calls for help, while a faded photo of a little girl in a first communion dress goes on gnawing his soul. He's irremediably directing his steps towards a disconnected route to damnation seen through the deformations of the 18 mm. wide angle camera lens aiming at distorting every details, altering the reality, making it fade out in remote and alien echoes. Kieslowski doesn't bring extenuating circumstances seasoned with honey-tongued tones of melodrama in favor of the defendant, differently from some Hollywood stereotypes like "I want to live" (by Robert Wise). He doesn't slip on the banana peel of useless pathetic scenes to extenuate Jazek's guilt and to mitigate the brutality of the crime, not interested at all in proximate psychological motivations to justify any display of extreme or violent behaviors and refusing to include any useless judicial proceedings. In other words, in Kieslowsky's opinion "a crime is always a crime": according to the principle of "par condicio" he puts the prosecutor on the same plane as the condemned man, using many signs or symbols to represent a society seen in the most sinister light. And we can't remain indifferent: even if we don't agree with him, Jazek's screams of anguish touch our hearts with pity in the same manner that Terri Schiavo's entreating eyes do.

Episode 5 of 'Dekalog' was also released in the expanded version called 'A Short Film About Killing (1988),' which I haven't seen, but it's certainly the most cinematic of the episodes so far. It is an early example of what Alissa Quart and Roger Ebert called the "hyperlink film," in which seemingly unrelated characters' stories converge or otherwise parallel with each other.

We are introduced to Piotr (Krzysztof Globisz), an idealistic young lawyer staunchly opposed to the death penalty (a view with which Kieslowski obviously agrees). We meet Jacek (Mirosław Baka), a scruffy young delinquent who wanders the city streets and gets up to mild mischief. Finally, there's Waldemar (Jan Tesarz), a taxi driver. At first it's unclear just how these stories are going to come together, if at all, and when they finally do it is with devastating intensity.

Kieslowski shows us two murders: one the crude random strangling of the taxi driver, and the other the state-sanctioned hanging of his killer. Both are depicted in excruciating detail (though I hear that the feature-length version is even more graphic), and the director's message is crystal clear: these two murders are exactly the same, one as contemptible as the other. This is the case even when Kieslowski muddies the water somewhat by making the taxi driver, the first victim, an unsympathetic sleaze.

Though the title is simplified to the point of irony - "Thou Shalt Not Kill" - the film has a lot things going on; with Kieslowski on the one hand presenting a moral and humane message (and a visual essay on the ironies of murder and state-funded execution), as well as the depiction of a central character who is never allowed to stray into the realms of caricature, making the performance of lead actor Miroslaw Baka one that resonates alongside other cinematic depictions of similarly tortured outsiders from films like Taxi Driver and Naked. Added to this, we have the world created by Kieslowski and his technicians that is neither reality nor fantasy, but rather, some in-between living hell, with a continually desolate atmosphere of damp melancholy that few films can equate. Right from the opening scene, the filmmaker paints a portrait of bleaker than bleak squalor, creating a place where wandering misfits drop rocks from a motorway over-pass, all the while watched by soulless, faceless vessels that peer from the windows of suffocating, claustrophobia-inducing tower-blocks.

The central image of the peripatetic loner drifting from town to town with the weight of the world on his shoulders is a universal one, prevalent in both literature and cinema history, though it is important to note that Kieslowski never allows his character to plumb the depths of melodrama in the way similar anti-heroes might, by denying us of a first-act back-story. This makes the character all the more enigmatic... a broken-down loser burning with inner torment that we cannot understand, until it is too late. The real crux of the story (and the moral centre to both the film and the character) doesn't become clear until mid-way into the second act, in which the director allows for moments of empathy and compassion, whilst simultaneously drawing parallels between the ideas of murder in the name of hate and murder in the name of the law. The two murder scenes that close act one and two respectively are, without question, the most devastating moments of cinema that I can ever recall seeing. The atmosphere that is created by the director and that matter-of-fact frankness in how the action is captured (with honesty and conviction) permeates through the nuances of the actors every expression and allows for the transformation from mere performer, through to the fragmented reflection of a real human being. This makes the prolonging of the violence and the character's painful desperation all the more heartbreaking, because Kieslowski understands his characters, and more importantly, understands his actors. The mood and feeling of an expressionistic viewpoint is further heightened throughout by cinematographer Slavomir Idziak's use of colour, composition and strange approach to focus, as he employs an "optical smudge" over one half of the screen in order to draw the audience's attention to what the filmmaker considers integral to the story at that particular point in time.

The world of Thou Shalt Not Kill is as murky and as troubled as the mind of our protagonist, with a great reliance on the colours, yellow, brown and green. This depressing pallet almost chokes us in the final scenes, when only a few sources of urine-tinged light are allowed to break through the darkness onto the tear-drenched face of the young killer during that amazing dialogue between the murderer and his solicitor towards the film's unflinching climax. However, beneath the drab locations and austere realisation of the text, the sense of drama has a strong emotional undercurrent throughout, though for much of the film it is kept secondary to the central message so as to avoid the kind of clichés rampant in this kind of film. As with the work of other directors from the same social-realist background, Kieslowski doesn't offer the viewer any easy answers - we don't get the last minute pardon, or the spoken word narration heaping forgiveness on the world, or a crescendo of violins to further the melodrama - this filmmaker presents us with a simple story and allows us to come to our own conclusions.