Decalogue (1988)

Directed by Krzystzof Kieslowski.

This legendary Polish miniseries is the highest-placing television offering on the list, and like THE SINGING DETECTIVE and JOAN THE MAID it feels more like a very long and episodic film than like a conventional television program. Kieslowski and collaborator Krzystzof Piesiewicz formulated the central idea for the miniseries- 10 one-hour telefilms inspired by the Ten Commandments- but the films' triumph is not in the conception but in the execution. Rather than telling simplistic parables in which the characters illustrate the commandments, Kieslowski and Piesiewicz go much deeper, examining the ways in which people in the modern world struggle with these age-old decrees, not always successfully. In one of the episodes, a girl who has grown close to her widower father must decide how to deal with her feelings after she discovers that he isn't her biological father after all; in another, the unfaithful wife of a gravely ill man finds out that she is pregnant by her lover, and tells her husband's doctor that the unborn child's fate will be decided by whether or not he believes her husband will die. All ten stories are set around a high-rise apartment building, and as we see characters from the other films going about their private business, the setting becomes a microcosm for our messy contemporary society, in which we bustle about and contend with our own troubles, oblivious to those of the people around us. The one exception to this in the DECALOGUE comes in its most beloved episode, in which a teenage voyeur falls in love with a woman he spies on, and decides to become part of her life. The way this film plays out defies all expectation, and yet in the end makes complete sense. The same could be said for the work as a whole, a transcendent and beautiful work which regardless of its original medium stands as a masterpiece.