Until the Sundance Channel acquired the television broadcast rights last March, Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue had only been seen by American audiences in fits and starts. The release of DVD versions last April finally brought the complete series stateside. Each of the 10 films is constructed carefully enough to be seen on its own. But together, they are a jigsaw puzzle of color, texture, emotion, and meaning. Over the course of the series, the seasons change.
Characters cross paths.
A mysterious wan-faced observer appears in eight of the films without explanation. Never once does its polyphonous framework seem gimmicky. They never reduced his ideas to the sort of smug structural shenanigans of, say, Peter Greenaway's counting games. The narrative machinery never obscures the power of his drama. Rather, Kieslowski, who died in 1996, was drawn to the intimate connections that bubble under the surface of these 10 films.