FILM / Tell it like it is: Krzysztof Kieslowski

IF SOCRATES and Ingres had been one person, living today and making films, they would have been Krzysztof Kieslowski. A lover of paradox and a thorn in the side of complacency, a sceptic with a visionary streak, Kieslowski is cinema's foremost metaphysician and moral philosopher. Those who think that cinema can no longer cope with ideas should sample Kieslowski's work, which tackles time and fate, justice and morality, the soul and God. He hasn't the answers, but he won't stop asking the questions. 'Socrates is near to me in this way,' he admits. 'But, on the other hand, Plato the rationalist is close to me too. I'm wary of people who 'know' - especially in politics. Those who have the answers do the worst things possible.'

Who could be certain of the answer to the dilemma posed in the second of Kieslowski's series of short films on the Ten Commandments, Decalogue? A specialist is approached by the wife of a patient who is desperately ill. Infertile before, she is now pregnant, but not by her husband. If he is going to survive, she wants an abortion. If he dies, she will keep her lover's child. She wants the specialist to tell her whether her husband will live or die. The husband is, in fact, recovering.

Does the specialist tell the truth and condemn the unborn child to death, or lie to save it? The answer is unequivocally given in a philosophy class in Decalogue 8 - no ideal comes before a child's life - but the title of the course fits the perplexity of Kieslowski's vision: Ethical Hell.

On paper this may look dour and academic. On film it is lit up by startling, numinous images. As the dying husband pulls from the brink, the camera dwells on his bedside drink. A fly is stumbling its way up the spoon, a counterpart to the man's hovering soul. Kieslowski's films are studded with such moments, the camera grave but feeling, more than an observer. In his masterpiece, The Double Life of Veronique, the Polish heroine sees her double on a French tourist bus in Warsaw: as she stares, the bus seems to turn a full circle on its axle before receding with its mystery. Out of the everyday, moments of haunting quirkiness flare up - literally, in Decalogue 2, when the wife pleading with the specialist absent-mindedly stubs a match out in its box, starting a pocket inferno.

A MATCHBOX also features in our interview, as Kieslowski lights a chain of cigarettes. Tall, lean, casually dressed, he looks out of place in this hotel suite, with its VIPs' Guide to London sitting pristine on the coffee table as he hunches over it. He seems caged, his wiry athleticism designed more for the arduous business of filming - waiting through frozen Polish nights to get the right voyeur's views in A Short Film About Love - than the rewards that follow. His forehead is franked with reflection, and his gaze is that of a man who's just lost something precious rather than won the Golden Lion at Venice.

When Kieslowski answers questions the Socratic parallel is reinforced. He is courteous but contrary, and severely precise. You feel a little like one of those chumps whose burning ideas get doused in the dialogues. You also recall that in Poland one of the most disgraced professions through the Communist years was that of journalist. When Andrzej Wajda, in some ways the father of Kieslowski's generation of Polish film-makers, dissected the state in Man of Iron, his police agent was a journalist. Kieslowski may have a residual wariness of the species. Perhaps it's a tic of his interpreter, but the words 'of course' float through his answers, as if it were all self-evident. His standard reply starts as a rebuttal before mellowing into reconciliation.

How important is music to him, I ask. The two Veroniques are singers united by a piercing, ethereal choral work, a refrain through the film. In Kieslowski's new film, Blue, another transcendent essay revolving around a woman's life, Juliette Binoche plays a composer's widow who may have had a hand in his work. Music in both films has a haunting, spiritual power.

Kieslowski: 'I only listen to it when I drive the car. I really don't know anything about music and it's no great experience for me. But I do think that music has a purifying element.' He discusses the structure of Blue, which uses black-outs and music to give a sense of time slowing down for the bereaved Binoche. I mention other film-makers who play with time. 'To tell you the truth I stopped studying film at film school, and since then I rarely go to the cinema. I think everybody looks for their own way. And, of course, we all take advantage of our colleagues' experience.' Colleagues? 'All those who describe the world.'

HE WAS born in south-west Poland in 1941, just three years before Yalta. It was an itinerant upbringing. The family followed his father, a civil engineer, who travelled seeking treatment for the tuberculosis which was to kill him when Krzysztof was a teenager. His childhood, he says, is a hazy, ill-remembered time, neither trauma nor triumph. His relationship with his father, perhaps because it was short-lived, was important, and seems to be remembered with remorse. Relationships between parents and children are some of the most intense in Kieslowski's films and the most difficult. The Decalogue is scarred with familial anguish, most movingly the first film, in which a boy's trust in his father leads to his drowning.

Kieslowski's mother, an office clerk, was influential in his getting into the Lodz Film School. Wajda and Polanski had been there; Jerzy Skolimowski and Krzysztof Zanussi were among Kieslowki's contemporaries. He had been interviewed and rejected three times (perhaps the reticence set in early); he persevered to please his mother. Once there, he watched films ('a lot, a lot') and started to make the documentaries that were his staple through the Seventies - describing the world. His graduation film in 1969 was a portrait of Lodz in all its grime and absurdity. But with the drab realism went a philosophical strain in which you can just detect the feature-film-maker he would become. There were films about factories, bricklayers and

copper mines. But there were also films like Talking Heads (1980), which posed Poles three questions: 'When were you born? What are you? What would you most like?'

To the last question, most said 'freedom'. Film-makers already had a degree of freedom, though it was fraught with anxiety. 'We were in a luxurious situation,' Kieslowski explains. 'The state funded us, and with the state's money we made films opposing it. (Whether they were shown is another matter.) The communists described the world as it should be, not as it was. We tried to describe it as it really was. The people recognised it; and that gave us another luxury, of having a public that needed us.' The public stayed loyal, but the censors turned nasty. It became harder to get work shown. The final straw for Kieslowski was the treatment of Station (1980), a documentary made in Warsaw's Central Railway Station using spy cameras to capture the listlessness and expectancy of station life. The footage was seized by the police looking for a suspect in a murder case.

He had mixed drama into the documentaries, and directed television plays, but The Scar (1976), which he dismisses as 'badly made socialist realism', had been his only full-length feature. With Camera Buff (1979), his feature career can be said to have begun. The story of a fanatical amateur film-maker who gets seconded into documenting the life of his factory before finding that his images offend the authorities, it prefigured the Station rumpus, and seemed to sum up Kieslowski's career. The film closes with the disillusioned cameraman removing the film and turning the camera on himself.

THAT IS what Kieslowski himself has done in the features since Camera Buff, turning the camera away from the world and on to individual human beings, to get 'some sense of life in this world'. The same shift can be seen in the work of contemporaries and friends such as Zanussi and Agnieszka Holland.

Blind Fate (1981) illustrated the trivial choices governing our lives and our blindness to their terrible importance. A young man runs for a train. Three possible outcomes are shown. 1. He catches the train, meets a Party member, and joins up. 2. He bumps into a guard, is jailed and joins the opposition. And 3. He misses the train, is sent abroad on business, and dies in a plane crash. Kieslowski says the third outcome is most pleasing to his pessimistic nature - and anyway, ultimately inevitable.

No End (1984), the story of a lawyer's widow, and her deepening feelings towards him after his death, also dwelt on the metaphysical, suggesting ways in which the living are guided by the dead, though Kieslowski is anxious to rationalise them.

Much of the film was set in law courts. Judges had been handing out brutal sentences. On camera they relented: as they turned soft, Kieslowski turned off. His camera was naturally in demand from defences. But when he explained to the authorities that he hadn't filmed because sentences were not being handed out, his letter was used as evidence of the leniency of martial law. This Kafkaesque twist led to a period of ostracism by liberals before the misunderstanding was cleared up.

The positive upshot of No End was meeting Krzysztof Piesewicz, a gifted lawyer who had prosecuted at the Popieluszko trial in 1984. All Kieslowski's subsequent films have been written in collaboration with Piesewicz, and it's possible to see in them greater intellectual rigour. The Decalogue was Piesewicz's idea: 10 films, each illustrating one of the 10 commandments and its modern relevance. In fact, they overlap - as, Kieslowski admits, will the films of his new trilogy, Three Colours: Blue, White and Red, on 'liberty, equality, and fraternity'. In the tale of the pregnant wife in Decalogue 2, the commandment is the second one, about not worshipping a graven image, but it could as easily be the one about adultery or bearing false witness.

The best two films in the Decalogue, 1 and 5, stand out because of the clarity of their message. Part 5, originally made in

longer form, as A Short Film About Killing, unequivocally condemns the taking of life in whatever cause. The gratuitous murder of a taxi driver is followed by the delinquent murderer's execution. Both deaths are filmed in excruciating detail and

are made to seem morally equivalent, equally abhorrent.

The intermingling of ideas is part of Kieslowski's richness. He is true to Hardy's dictum: 'All things merge . . . good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics.' The Double Life of Veronique (1991) may be Kieslowski's best film because it seems to be pitched at just such a point: where metaphysics moves into moral philosophy, mysticism into religion, the soul into the body. The story of the two girls, born at the same time, into the same life, struck a chord around the world. The Polish Weronika dies singing; the French Veronique stops and saves herself. The film explores the role of intuition in our moral lives. Shot in a ravishing, golden light, it has an almost iconic sheen, heightened by its otherworldly score. In London it ran for 56 weeks at the MGM Swiss Centre. The assistant manager says it was a film which people came to see several times.

Kieslowski is cagey about the success of Veronique. He says it surprised him, but is reluctant to analyse the source of its power: 'Maybe it was the story or the way it was narrated . . . '. A young French girl told him that through seeing the film she realised there was such a thing as a soul: 'That for me is the greatest reward and more important than the salary.'

IN REMARKS like this you can read a desperate sincerity, a desire bred of bafflement to link up with like souls in the void. But that wouldn't be quite right. Though he hedges towards agnosticism, he defines his beliefs clearly.

A Kieslowski decalogue might read something like this:

1. Fate. Close to Julius Caesar: 'Men at some time are masters of their fates; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves . . . ' Both Veronique and Witek, the hero of Blind Chance, change their fate through action. But there is also something immutable in character: Witek has three different lives but remains the same decent person in all of them.

2. Freedom. The subject of his new film, Blue, in which Binoche turns her back on everything in her former life, but finds uncontrollable feelings pulling her back. True freedom involves responsibility. Equality, the subject of White, is 'absolute illusion: we deceive ourselves that we want to be equal'.

3. Death. Half in love with it? Suicide attempts are strangely beautiful: slit wrists seeping red in A Short Film About Love.

4. Light. Often tinted, always elusive. It shimmers and ripples, glows and flickers, before being swallowed by the gloom.

5. Film. Kieslowski appears disillusioned with the medium. He describes it as 'both over-literal and imprecise'.

6. Literature. A source of greater pleasure - particularly Camus, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. 'Adapting a good book simply harms the book.'

7. Poland. He still lives there, bitter at the hand the country has been dealt by history and geography. His early work documents the demoralisation and corruption. In the Decalogue things haven't improved, with institutions such as law and medicine presented as callous and unresponsive. He did not vote in the recent election, for want of a decent candidate. The problem, though, is global: 'There's no real authority in the world.'

8. Women. Always presented as more intuitive than men: Veronique, he says, could not have been about a man. His attitude may be linked to his acknowledged, very Polish, romanticism.

9. Communism. It is never demonised in the films; more pitied and ridiculed, with a horrified fascination. Kieslowski compares it to Aids. 'It's a question of being affected by the illness even if you're against it. Doctors die also.'

10. God. Nowhere and everywhere in the films. When the ethics professor of Decalogue 8 is asked who judges human actions, she answers: 'He who is. He who is in all of us. I don't go to church and never use the word 'God'. But you can live with Belief without using the word.'

ABOUT the future he is unforthcoming, even suggesting he may retire. The depth of Kieslowski's vision seems to come out of a fierce self-scrutiny bordering on self-contempt: if he has seen far it is because he has scoured his own personality down to the raw feeling. He speaks much about 'earning' the right to make more films by connecting with an audience, the ethics involved in spending money on films. The toil is as much moral as physical - and weariness may be setting in. His vision of the future, of course, starts in colour: 'I'm looking at it through quite pink glasses. In other words I don't want to do anything any more. I will sit down on a chair and sit.'