Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Slawomir Idziak
Photography: Slawomir Idziak
Music: Zbigniew Preisner
Editor: Jacques Witta
Cast: Juliet Binoche, Benoit Regent, Florence Pernel, Charlotte Very, Helene Vincent, Philippe Volter, Claude Duneton, Hugues Quester, Emmanuelle Riva, Julie Delpy
Trilogies are an idea that comes from the literary world, where it appears to have become every novelist’s ambition to write one—that is, three novels that are linked somehow. Did you know William Gibson’s Neuromancer is the first novel in a trilogy? (I’m not even trying to address series that can run for many, many often very big novels. People like them too but no one appears to want to call them octologies or whatever. Make it “cycle.”) Sometimes a trilogy can amount to a single long work—John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are good examples. Sometimes it’s more notional. Beat writer William Burroughs has at least two trilogies that are united only, as far as I can tell, by consecutive publication dates and/or by Burroughs (or someone) saying they are a trilogy.
Director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy is more like the latter, with separate narratives and characters, playing with larger political and cultural themes. One way that point is emphasized at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT) is by listing the three titles separately. (They do the same for the Lord of the Rings movies, but I’m more inclined to take those as a single very big movie.) (To confuse the matter further, there is also another 1993 picture, written and directed by Derek Jarman and featuring Tilda Swinton, called Blue.) Three Colors is formally united by the colors of the French flag—the “blue, white, and red,” as they say—which in turn represent liberty, equality, and fraternity, respectively. Kieslowski treats them separately by film (perhaps ironic that white is equality in the weakest of the three, but we’ll get to that). This very impressive first picture in the trilogy formally plays with the idea of “liberty”—it may be somewhat strained, loaded down with art film markers, and it may be a somewhat narrow view of liberty (“emotional,” per Kieslowski), but nonetheless it works well and makes a good picture.
Trilogies are an idea that comes from the literary world, where it appears to have become every novelist’s ambition to write one—that is, three novels that are linked somehow. Did you know William Gibson’s Neuromancer is the first novel in a trilogy? (I’m not even trying to address series that can run for many, many often very big novels. People like them too but no one appears to want to call them octologies or whatever. Make it “cycle.”) Sometimes a trilogy can amount to a single long work—John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are good examples. Sometimes it’s more notional. Beat writer William Burroughs has at least two trilogies that are united only, as far as I can tell, by consecutive publication dates and/or by Burroughs (or someone) saying they are a trilogy.
Director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy is more like the latter, with separate narratives and characters, playing with larger political and cultural themes. One way that point is emphasized at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT) is by listing the three titles separately. (They do the same for the Lord of the Rings movies, but I’m more inclined to take those as a single very big movie.) (To confuse the matter further, there is also another 1993 picture, written and directed by Derek Jarman and featuring Tilda Swinton, called Blue.) Three Colors is formally united by the colors of the French flag—the “blue, white, and red,” as they say—which in turn represent liberty, equality, and fraternity, respectively. Kieslowski treats them separately by film (perhaps ironic that white is equality in the weakest of the three, but we’ll get to that). This very impressive first picture in the trilogy formally plays with the idea of “liberty”—it may be somewhat strained, loaded down with art film markers, and it may be a somewhat narrow view of liberty (“emotional,” per Kieslowski), but nonetheless it works well and makes a good picture.
The narrative premise here is big enough and rich enough to encompass “liberty” along with another well-known sense of “blue”—being sad. Juliet Binoche plays Julie, a woman who has recently lost her husband and 5-year-old daughter in an auto accident that she barely survived herself. Her late husband was a major composer who had been commissioned to write a symphony to celebrate the inauguration of the EU, intended to be performed only once by orchestras in 12 cities on the inauguration day. In many ways, Kieslowski’s three pictures and their unifying themes are about the coming of the EU.
Julie experiences the grief of her loss first as a cold rage. She is a gifted composer herself, with the skills and knowledge to finish her husband’s piece. She doesn’t want to, however, and instead sets about taking apart her previous life, cashing it out for some as yet unknown future. Her first step is to destroy the music manuscripts she had been working on with her husband. She makes arrangements to sell all her holdings, which are substantial, and her plan seems to be to disappear into the world. She is systematically throwing everything in her life away.
The plot points weave across a complex life of wealth, intense creativity, and secrets coming to light. She makes friends with a sex worker in the apartment building she moves to in Paris. She finds out her husband had a mistress, and that she is pregnant with his child. She finds a nest of rats in her apartment and is paralyzed with fear and loathing of them. She visits her mother, institutionalized with dementia. Her mother is friendly but never entirely clear who Julie is, underlining how alone Julie is in the world. By extension, Three Colors: Blue emphasizes how alone we all are in this world. Our closest relationships, our firmest grounding, can wash away with a car crash and aging. Everything else is random connection.
Three Colors: Blue is another picture—like The Piano, which also came out in 1993, as well as the more recent Portrait of a Lady on Fire—that is notably good on the artist’s world of concentration, inspiration, frustration, and creation. In spite of her grief and her efforts to kick away from music, Julie is consumed by it. Fragments from the score play as the camera sweeps slowly across pages of music manuscript. In a great scene of collaboration, we hear a single passage as it is revised, dropping out percussion, then trumpets, adding in a flute to carry the musical theme. Similarly, as the various conflicts in this story emerge and play out, Julie is often emotionally overwhelmed, which is depicted as a random swelling of orchestral passages on the soundtrack. They stop everything, much like swells of emotion themselves. The screen goes black as the music plays, loud, for several seconds. Then we return to Julie attempting to recover her poise.
Zbigniew Preisner, who scored Three Colors: Blue, is a well-regarded modern composer in his own right. If anyone’s going to write a symphony for 12 orchestras in 12 cities, by reputation he’s as good a candidate as anyone. Full disclosure, I don’t know his work well, but it’s perfect in this picture—icy-cold and sumptuously oceanic by turns, one more perfect element in a picture astonishingly full of them. Some things about Three Colors: Blue may arguably be overdone—the blue tinting is rampant and often obvious (though Kieslowski retreats to his preferred sepia palette more often than I remembered). That problem, to the extent it is a problem, recurs in all three pictures in the trilogy. Kieslowski is not quite on the wrong side of heavy-handed on the visual design point, but he comes close. On the other hand he is always artful, never overly intrusive, and it hits the unification theme, which may be the point of the whole thing. Three Colors: Blue is richly dense, complex, ambitious, and very satisfying and beautiful—an auspicious start to this trilogy.
Julie experiences the grief of her loss first as a cold rage. She is a gifted composer herself, with the skills and knowledge to finish her husband’s piece. She doesn’t want to, however, and instead sets about taking apart her previous life, cashing it out for some as yet unknown future. Her first step is to destroy the music manuscripts she had been working on with her husband. She makes arrangements to sell all her holdings, which are substantial, and her plan seems to be to disappear into the world. She is systematically throwing everything in her life away.
The plot points weave across a complex life of wealth, intense creativity, and secrets coming to light. She makes friends with a sex worker in the apartment building she moves to in Paris. She finds out her husband had a mistress, and that she is pregnant with his child. She finds a nest of rats in her apartment and is paralyzed with fear and loathing of them. She visits her mother, institutionalized with dementia. Her mother is friendly but never entirely clear who Julie is, underlining how alone Julie is in the world. By extension, Three Colors: Blue emphasizes how alone we all are in this world. Our closest relationships, our firmest grounding, can wash away with a car crash and aging. Everything else is random connection.
Three Colors: Blue is another picture—like The Piano, which also came out in 1993, as well as the more recent Portrait of a Lady on Fire—that is notably good on the artist’s world of concentration, inspiration, frustration, and creation. In spite of her grief and her efforts to kick away from music, Julie is consumed by it. Fragments from the score play as the camera sweeps slowly across pages of music manuscript. In a great scene of collaboration, we hear a single passage as it is revised, dropping out percussion, then trumpets, adding in a flute to carry the musical theme. Similarly, as the various conflicts in this story emerge and play out, Julie is often emotionally overwhelmed, which is depicted as a random swelling of orchestral passages on the soundtrack. They stop everything, much like swells of emotion themselves. The screen goes black as the music plays, loud, for several seconds. Then we return to Julie attempting to recover her poise.
Zbigniew Preisner, who scored Three Colors: Blue, is a well-regarded modern composer in his own right. If anyone’s going to write a symphony for 12 orchestras in 12 cities, by reputation he’s as good a candidate as anyone. Full disclosure, I don’t know his work well, but it’s perfect in this picture—icy-cold and sumptuously oceanic by turns, one more perfect element in a picture astonishingly full of them. Some things about Three Colors: Blue may arguably be overdone—the blue tinting is rampant and often obvious (though Kieslowski retreats to his preferred sepia palette more often than I remembered). That problem, to the extent it is a problem, recurs in all three pictures in the trilogy. Kieslowski is not quite on the wrong side of heavy-handed on the visual design point, but he comes close. On the other hand he is always artful, never overly intrusive, and it hits the unification theme, which may be the point of the whole thing. Three Colors: Blue is richly dense, complex, ambitious, and very satisfying and beautiful—an auspicious start to this trilogy.
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