The basis of
a mistake already committed before the beginning of the film is radicalized
here. It is no longer a close story that the episode summons, but the ghosts of
the Nazi occupation, the way Polish society has hidden its dark hours of the
last century. Warsaw becomes the repository, within its walls and crossroads,
of a repressed collective drama. Sofia (Maria Koscialkowska), an elderly
professor, gives a seminar on ethics and political philosophy. On a casuistic
model, students present to the audience a case for discussion. The first
consists of a news item ... which we understand to be the Decalogue II affair,
putting Kieślowski's ethical ambition in abyss. Then intervenes a visitor from
America, Elzbieta (Teresa Marczewska): in 1943, a little Jewish girl, finding
refuge with a Catholic couple, while waiting for a priest to take her to
another hiding place, was abandoned to her. - even by these. The case states
that they would not agree to lie to the authorities. In a historical setting,
the example reenacts the Kant / Benjamin Constant quarrel over the obligation
not to lie (ie the problem of moral deontologism when it turns to dogmatism).
To the reaction of the teacher, the attitude of the storyteller (she has the
age and profile to have been this girl, wields a cross pendant with a degree of
derision that will remain undecidable until it is discovered. later praying in
a room), it becomes clear that both are the protagonists of this story.
Distraught, Sofia finds Elzbieta at the end of class, whom she didn't know was
still alive. Inviting him to her home, she explains to him the reasons for this
abandonment (linked to the risk that a resistant network will be dismantled by
her), perhaps still unacceptable, but less inadmissible than those presumed by
the victim. The remorse is no less irresolvable.
The film
connects several segments of the whole. Besides the mention of the second
episode, the tunnel leading to Praga taken in Decalogue III is taken by day in
the opposite direction, while an important (but absent) character from
Decalogue X makes a cameo before hostilities. Places and characters reappear,
intersect, from one episode to the next, a "trick" taken up by Joe
Swanberg for his own existential and reflective series, Easy. So many lives, so
many different problems in the same building, recalls the professor. This is
the moral heart of this story, dealing with collective responsibility, the
weight of our actions on others (you can't really do "what's right"
when it leads to the unhappiness of an innocent woman). If the dilemmas
presented so far have tended to question utilitarianism, it is the logic of
duty, of strict obedience to the rule, which, conversely, is called into
question here. Kieślowski, against moral systems with universal pretension,
seeks borderline cases, those where integrity breaks with the ordinarily
reasonable rule. Kant hated, rightly in view of his project, casuistry - this
way of looking for the little beast with general laws. There is an element of
this hunt for the exception (and, therefore, Catholic) in the thinking of the
filmmaker, his way of exploring situations where personal motivations appear,
changing the situation in relation to abstract justifications of prime. at
first not very refutable. Carrying out this skeptical inquiry requires asking
the question of the world, of the capacity of ethics to coincide with its
course (a question posed with aggressive acuteness by the Shoah). The Righteous
Elzbieta wanted to meet to thank (Tadeusz Łomnicki) a tailor broken by the
bullying, the punishments received for doing well, no longer wishing to look
back on his past, perhaps regretting the help he gave. For Kant an inevitable
dimension of ethics: that it be practiced without hope of reward.
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