I have spent much of the day rewatching the entire Dekalog. This is after a copy of the published screenplays for the series arrived yesterday, which gives me another resource to compare against for these essays. In reading a great deal recently about the series, Kieslowski mentioned that he liked to open each episode with a bit of atmospheric chaos. The entire series takes place at a housing complex and he wanted viewers to have the sense that there were a number of characters mulling around at the beginning of each episode and the camera just randomly decided to follow this one.

In the case of episodes 3, that random person is Janusz, a cabdriver who is dressed as Santa Claus, hauling a number of packages. There are also drunken characters dragging Christmas trees on the snowy ground — and Kryzsztof from episode one coming out of the apartment building door. Kryzsztof holds the door for Janusz and says he didn’t at first recognize him. It’s good to see him again, but you can’t help but feel his loss as he looks through the apartment window and we see Janusz passing out gifts to his children inside.

Kryzsztof is clearly a man who continues to grieve. The scene inside strikes me as a little odd as well. The children all seem to buy into the Santa visit on Christmas Eve and happily take their gifts handed out one at a time to each child, then to their grandmother and finally to their mother. But no one ever stops to ask, hey, where’s dad? Or at least, why hasn’t Santa left something for him? There’s a sense right off the bat that the absent father is already built into the story, that Janusz is often there, but rarely present.

These scenes are intercut with shots of the second lead character of this episode -- Ewa (pronounced Ava) -- driving across Warsaw. At a red light, she sees a small boy run across a street towards a lit community Christmas tree, his father running after him. She looks wistfully at this.

Returning to Janusz, he's taking off his Santa Claus outfit as his wife Kasia comes in ... she thanks him for the ski poles she received and asks if they will be able to get away. He says that they can try. There a strong sense of weariness coming from him.

The scene now shifts back to Ewa. Now, what’s interesting here is that, while much of the action of this episode will center on both Janusz and Ewa, this scene wasn’t in the published screenplay, it was something that the filmmakers thought up during production and thought was important to include. That’s very rare for Kieslowski — he regularly takes things out of his scripts in the editing process, but this is the only major incident in the Dekalog where he adds something in.

It’s a lovely, but sad scene. Ewa visits a nursing home on Christmas Eve and there sees her aunt. (Extended family is important throughout The Dekalog.) She is not attending the Christmas Party that is taking place in the building's common area and Ewa is informed that she's in her room. She asks if she is unwell, and the orderly seems to nod yes.

Her aunt is asleep as she arrives. She puts down some gifts. As she wakes up, it's clear that the aunt has dementia (something Kieslowski will repeat in “Three Colours: Blue.”) After Ewa gives her a present, the aunt asks if she finished her homework and if she completed her math. She tells her that she was always good at math. A viewer might wonder if maybe this aunt raised Ewa.

The camera lingers on the room as the aunt falls back asleep, Ewa slowly leaves, and then the camera peers out the window as Ewa gets in her car, a reflection of the lamp from the room hovering in reflection. There's this feeling of loneliness that transfers from the aunt slowly drifting away with fading memories to Ewa. It was important for Kieslowski to include this sccne, because in much of the episode that follows, Ewa seems manipulative, even demented at times. By building this foundation of empathy for her, we can avoiding thinking of her as a villain in everything that happens next.