Got out Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Decalogue from GenX and watched the first episode of ten. Pretty grim. And it strikes me that in a series of movies based on the ten commandments there will not be many opportunities for comic relief. The first commandment (I had to look this up) is "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" and the protagonist in the episode has rather too much pride in his ability to calculate (he has a computer running DOS) and, boy, does he have it coming from a jealous God. (This makes it sound more like an episode of The Twilight Zone than it is, but there is that aspect.)
A commandment is a problematic subject for a movie because it has no moral content. The bad consequences of breaching a commandment aren't inherent in it, they come from outside, from it being commanded. The commandment might as well be "Don't step on the white line." One approach to adapting it is to naturalize it, to put it into the world as an instance of wisdom of a conditional form. Instead of "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" something like "Don't stay with your head up your ass, because you'll miss things!". (In comparison, you have the Eric Rohmer movies based on proverbs such as "He who has two women loses his soul, he who has two houses loses his mind.") And maybe that is the source of ambiguity in the Kieslowski movie, in that we live simultaneously in a world of practical reason, and in a world of irrational forces. Or maybe there is no ambiguity. I will have to see where he goes with it. Nine hours to go!
