Three Colors: Red (1994)

Trois couleurs: Rouge, France / Switzerland / Poland, 99 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Edward Klosinski, Marcin Latallo

Photography: Piotr Sobocinski

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Jacques Witta

Cast: Irene Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Pierre Lorit, Frederique Feder

Based on the French flag colors of the “blue, white, and red,” Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy wraps up with Red and a story of fraternity (as opposed to the liberty themes of Blue and equality themes of White). Although Red was the first of the trilogy I saw when it was new, and my favorite, it feels now more like a winding-down, even pale feel-good exercise, with some air of mystery, a kinda sorta heartening redemption story, and ham-handed cameos from the first two movies. Human bonds are forged, here as in life, via family ties, sometimes. But more often by random chance. Who can account for why we have made the friends we have?

In a way Red has Kieslowski’s biggest star yet in Jean-Louis Trintignant, who died just last year. He’s an art film hero and veteran whose roles date back to 1955 and include My Night at Maud’s, The Conformist, and, much later, Amour (not to mention the spaghetti western The Great Silence). In Red he plays a retired judge who spies on people and feels embittered and alone. Irene Jacob previously appeared in Kieslowski’s 1992 movie The Double Life of Veronique and once again, as Valentine here, is a kindly, wide-eyed soul of goodness. In a moment of distracted driving she runs over the judge’s German Shepherd dog Rita, who is pregnant. No dogs are harmed in the making of this film but they do have their trials in the narrative. Rita, who has the face of a saint, is injured only with scrapes and bruises. She recovers, but the judge doesn’t care.

Three Colors: White (1994)

Trois couleurs: Blanc, Switzerland / France / Poland, 92 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Edward Klosinski, Marcin Latallo

Photography: Edward Klosinski

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Urszula Lesiak

Cast: Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy, Janusz Gajos, Jerzy Stuhr

Director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski positively seems to love the dense, evocative, confounding narratives he constructs based on abstractions and ironical moral precepts. His best movie—if you want to call a 10-hour TV miniseries a movie, and I do—was Dekalog, which worked with the biblical 10 Commandments, one at a time, with a double handful of masterpieces. His breakthrough Three Colors trilogy, the last movies he made—he died in 1996 at the age of 54—is similarly focused on the colors of the French flag, the “blue, white, and red,” typically radicalizing their meanings of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” (respectively). We have already seen the radical liberty, in Three Colors: Blue, of a woman who has lost everything. Now we encounter the radical equality of a bitter failing marriage in Paris between a Polish immigrant, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), and a French woman, Dominique (Julie Delpy).

Dominique is divorcing Karol because he has never been able to consummate the marriage, as she announces in open court, one more way she can humiliate him. It’s something of a preoccupation of hers. She has a cruel streak a mile deep—her name hammers that point home (while his has intimations of femininity and submission). Karol tries to explain himself at the hearing but the divorce is granted, which ruins him. He is homeless, penniless, begging on the street. Eventually he befriends a Polish national in Paris who helps him find his way back home by wedging him into a suitcase for the flight.

Three Colors: Blue (1993)

Trois couleurs: Bleu, France / Poland / Switzerland, 99 minutes

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.

Dekalog (1989)

Poland / West Germany, 572 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Photography: Piotr Sobocinski, Witold Adamek, Jacek Blawut, Slawomir Idziak, Andrzej J. Jaroszewicz, Edward Klosinski, Dariusz Kuc, Krzysztof Pakulski, Wieslaw Zdort

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Ewa Smal
Cast: Artur Barcis, Olgierd Lukaszewicz, Olaf Lubaszenko, Aleksander Bardini, Krystyna Janda, Piotr Machalica, Jan Tesarz, Stanislaw Gawlik, Krzysztof Kumor, Katarzyna Piwowarczyk, Maciej Szary

Maybe the best thing director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski ever did—though admittedly it has stiff competition—Dekalog is more properly a TV miniseries, which aired in Poland in 1989. It consists of 10 episodes of about an hour each. Each one riffs on one of the 10 Commandments, in order. But don’t dwell too much on the biblical side of this, because apparently there are versioning problems even with the freaking 10 Commandments. In fact, most of their representations here are knotty oblique stories of moral imperatives and moral difficulties. They move slow and meditative, like a lot of European art cinema, but these characters and their situations tend to stick. The relation of each plotline to its likely respective Commandment is not always easy to make out. Though these dramas arguably weaken toward the later episodes, they are all the stuff of after-viewing pie and coffee discussion.

I should note that the cast list above only shows people who were in more than one episode, many in very minor parts, rather than the numerous stars of each, who are uniformly excellent. Among other things, Dekalog is an actor’s showcase with a lot of Polish players who are more familiar the more Polish cinema you’ve seen. I don’t have the space for them all—there are literally at least two or three great performances in each episode. Most of the people I listed above are more like the connective tissue of Dekalog, which frankly is not that strong. Glancing plot points resurface in other episodes, but they are scattered and often very slight. All the characters live in the same brutalist-style apartment complex in Warsaw. Occasionally others from another episode wander by or their story is directly if briefly retold. These stories, each one, are richly dense and it’s not hard to spend 10 days or two weeks or longer on Dekalog.

The Double Life of Veronique (1991)

La double vie de Véronique, France / Poland / Norway, 98 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Photography: Slawomir Idziak

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Jacques Witta

Cast: Irene Jacob, Halina Gryglaszewska, Kalina Jedrusik, Aleksandr Bardini, Wladyslaw Kowalski, Jerzy Gudejko, Philippe Volter

The Double Life of Veronique is ultimately a bit of a puzzle box movie, but I was so smitten with it when I saw it for the first time 10 years ago that I ranked it #3 for 1991 (after Dogfight and Hearts of Darkness, see here). I thought then it could become my favorite for 1991, perhaps because it's so beloved by critics, but a recent revisit did not make me as high. I felt compelled to dive into DVD extras to get a handle on it, even reading the Jonathan Romney essay, "Through the Looking Glass," written circa 2006. I was happy to find him arguing, amidst all the rapture, that it "endure[s] as a spellbinding experience, as well as a perplexing one." Romney also quotes another critic, Nigel Andrews, who wrote: "I believe we are being hypnotized in The Double Life of Veronique.... How else to explain the ability of a French-Polish film with a nonsensical plot premise ... to enthrall and enchant us like no European film in recent history?"

The nonsensical plot premise is more or less a doppelganger story, but it spans great unknowable distances. There are two of her: Weronika in Poland, and Veronique in France, both played with zest and charisma by Irene Jacob, a glowing presence. Both of their lives are wrapped up in music one way or another and there are other parallels. Veronique actually happens to take a photo of Weronika on a trip to central Europe but never notices the photo until many years later. When one of them dies the other feels a powerful unexplained sadness. Director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski tries to explain by saying the picture "was difficult ... because it deals with things you can't name. If you do, they seem trivial and stupid"—and just so with plot summaries.