KIESLOWSKI BROUGHT HEART TO WORLD FILM AUDIENCE.

Byline: Jay Carr Boston Globe

Krzysztof Kieslowski, who died Wednesday from a heart attack at age 54, was Poland's foremost filmmaker - and one of the world's. In an age of technology worship, Kieslowski's films insisted on the importance of spirituality and mystery. Skeptical, ironic, austere in his filmmaking style, he also was idealistic and romantic. He hid this behind a thin-lipped outsider's smile, a chain-smoker's reflexes and cryptic talk. Coming as he did from a long Eastern European tradition of working around repression, he was no stranger to the defenses of indirection and ambiguity. But he found ways to charge his imagery with meaning and linkages that few other postmoderns even attempted.

Chief among the reasons Kieslowski's films remain tantalizing is their insistence that we can't know everything, that we must simply take some things on faith. His films never were meant to be understood in linear ways. But they more than justify their elliptical nature. "Red," the most popular of his films with U.S. audiences, connects not only with the other two installments of his tricolor trilogy, "Blue" and "White," but with "The Double Life of Veronique" in its evocation of the fragile filaments linking people - often in ways veiled from conscious awareness.

"Red" begins with a phone call we follow through the receiver, through the wires, through the cable, under Lake Geneva, to the other phone. Before the film ends with a bravura flourish - a parade of the characters from "Blue," "White" and "Red" - it makes the bonds between its simpatico characters seem miraculous. When Irene Jacob finally meets Mr. Right on the sea of love, it seems both capricious and preordained, fateful and unpredictable, film's sweetest working out yet of chaos theory. It never seems controlled - part of its message is that life can't be controlled - yet it always seems inevitable.

It's deep, grave, yet airy, full of playfulness. And Kieslowski's way of working the color red into the film - in a poster, a bowling ball, a car, a glass of wine, blood from a wound, a strand of electrical cable - never lets us overlook the seraphic twinkle behind his severe gaze. "Blue," about a grieving widow, Juliette Binoche, is filled with melancholy and irony, with blue and blues. "White," with Zbigniew Zamachowski and Julie Delpy ending as prisoners of love, is mostly about ways of dulling pain, then making it funny, then finally transcending it. Like "Red," Kieslowski's "The Double Life of Veronique" celebrates Jacob's angelic sentience twice over in an elegant, enigmatic, haunting doppelganger reverie that reminds us how mysteriously lives can intersect.

The grand patterning and large-spanned overviews of "The Double Life of Veronique" and the tricolor trilogy first came to the world's attention in 1988 at Cannes, when Kieslowski's ability to tap into secular mysticism became stunningly apparent in one of the great film milestones of the '80s. This was his often jolting and imaginatively philosophical "Decalogue," 10 hourlong films made for Polish television, each themed to one of the Ten Commandments. Two, expanded to feature length, subsequently were released as "A Short Film About Killing" and "A Short Film About Love." The first ends with a young man convicted of murder being dragged from his cell by a squad of police and hanged.

But the film is as violent in its opening shots of dead cockroaches, drowned rats and a dead cat. Shot through filters and permeated by a grim integrity, it's both an anti-capital-punishment film and a despairing view of Poland that remained just as mordant when Kieslowski satirized burgeoning capitalism there in "White." The gritty texture of Kieslowski's "Decalogue" reflects his beginnings as a maker of documentaries. Influenced by Andrzej Wajda, Kieslowski's early films zeroed in on the societal conditions that catalyzed the Solidarity movement. His 1979 breakthrough, "Camera Buff," was semi-autobiographical, about an amateur who comes to grief after graduating from home movies to committed social documentary-making.

After announcing his retirement from filmmaking in 1994, saying he felt drained by the effort of making "Red," "White" and "Blue" - including close attention to the music and even ambient noise - Kieslowski relented during a trip to Boston last year. He said he might write a new trilogy but not direct it. Joking, he added that he planned to spend the next few years sitting in a room, smoking. Later last year, he suffered his first heart attack. While in Boston, he said the success of his films did little to change a perspective he described as pessimistic.

"I think things are even more sad than I showed," he said. "I'm glad people walked out when the film about killing had its premiere at Cannes. This shows they have sensitivity. Thank God you can still find it."

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Photo Krzysztof Kieslowski Poland's foremost filmmaker