If you love film, you must see the brilliant Trois couleurs trilogy, which I just viewed again. The title is French, director Krzysztof Kieslowski was Polish, and the themes pan-European. The order in which you should view them are: Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge. Depending on the data base you search, they might appear under their French titles or their English translations (Blue, White, Red). Each was distributed by MKZ Diffusion. They are in French with some Polish and English. Do not let subtitles deter you; they are masterpieces.
Trois couleurs appeared at a crucial moment in European history. Discussions of a unified Europe had been kicked around since after World War II and decisions implemented in stages. Standardized monetary exchanges came in 1986, and the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht eliminated border controls between member states and set in motion various other mechanisms: the creation of a blue European Union flag (1993), a central bank (1994), and the adoption of the Euro in 1999 in most EU nations. (Not all of Europe belongs to the EU, most notably Iceland, Moldova, Norway, Switzerland, several Balkan countries, and Britain, which left the EU in 2020.)
Whether it’s on the screen overtly or not, the coming integration of Europe lurks in the background of Trois couleurs. So too do reflections upon the colors of the French flag: blue for liberty, white for equality, and red for fraternity. Pay attention to the clever ways in which Kieslowski links one film to the next (some tips below), the circularity of the films, the clash between old and new, and as the late Roger Ebert observed, the ways in which Kieslowski subverts conventional notions of tragedy, romance, and comedy.
Bleu/Blue (1993, 94 minutes) stars Juliette Binoche as Julie de Courcy, the wife of Patrice, a composer who dies in a car crash that almost kills Julie as well. He left unfinished an anthem to European unity, and Julie is besieged by those who suspect she is the real genius behind her celebrated husband’s compositions. Among them is Olivier Benôit, who has loved Julie from afar. Julie is too consumed by grief to care about music, Oliver, or what others want. In this sense Bleu is the color of grief and when I say the screen is bathed in that color, I mean it’s as if it were literally washed in blue.
For various reasons, including constant calls from journalists and the anthem commission, her mother’s dementia (the divine Emmanuelle Riva in a cameo), and the revelation that Patrice had a mistress, Julie puts her country estate and all of its contents up for sale, and moves to Paris in an attempt to be anonymous. At some point, grief mutates into an embrace of her solitary life (“liberty”). A few things will happen that melt Julie’s defenses, including a friendship with her peep show exhibitionist neighbor and Benôit’s reappearance, but Bleu can also be seen as feminist awakening.
Binoche is riveting. When she meets Sandrine, the lawyer carrying Patrice’s child, their encounter is not what you’d anticipate. Sandrine tells Julie that she’s not the sort of woman a man would leave, and we know exactly why she said it. Watch also for the color shift as the anthem grows closer to completion, with blue sharing the screen with green. Is this a subtle hint that monetary unity will destroy the old ways? Don’t bet against such an interpretation; not everyone was happy to abandon markers of nationalism. Trois couleurs shows that tension, quite often by juxtaposing younger people with older ones.
Blanc/White (1994, 87 minutes) is my least favorite in the trilogy but I appreciated it more this time. After an opening shot of cases moving along a conveyor belt–a foreshadowing of an important plot device–we see one of Kieslowski’s connecting links. Sandrine is the lawyer about to enter a divorce court to dissolve the marriage of Dominique Vidal (Julie Delpy) and her Polish husband Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) on the grounds that Karol is impotent. He opposes the divorce, but what chance does a Polish hairdresser with rudimentary French have after admitting he had not consummated his marriage?
Notice that a stooped old woman struggling to recycle bottles reappears in Blanc and remember that white represents equality. It’s hard to discuss the plot without resorting to spoilers, so I will simply note that equality is further embedded within several key relationships, those of Dominique and Karol, Karol’s with his brother Jurek, Karol’s with his well-to-do benefactor Mikolaj, Mikolaj’s with himself, and Karol’s with those in France who dissed a poor Polish immigrant. This film certainly demonstrates why Roger Ebert said Kieslowski undermined conventional movie romances. The film ends with what is outwardly a labyrinthian revenge, but Kieslowski leaves open a barred window to the possibility we’ve not yet seen the film’s final chapter.
I really mused upon equality this time around and suspect I simply missed clues and cues in 1994. On the other hand, it remains Kieslowski’s weak link as its equality theme is incompletely developed. But Kieslowski certainly painted the screen white: shirts and dresses, Delpy’s pale complexion, sunlight bleaching her blonde tresses, snow, ice…. Whites contrast with gray, especially in scenes shot in Poland, perhaps Kieslowski signaling that Poland was an outlier in plans to unite the continent.
Rouge/Red (1994, 99 minutes) is on my list of all-time favorite films. And, yes, it bleeds red, the color of fraternity. One reviewer described the term “luminous” to describe Irène Jacob, who inhabits the role of Valentine Dussaut.
Rouge is set in Geneva, where Valentine is a university student and part-time high-fashion model. She is kind, thoughtful, and so stunning that her chewing gum advertisement becomes a gigantic traffic-stopping hanging banner. (Want to guess the background color?) Alas, she’s in love with a jerk who either can’t or won’t commit and whose phone calls from London are abrupt and insensitive. Valentine also has family woes. Her life takes a turn when she hits a gentle German shepherd named Rita as she drives home.
Rita is alive, Valnetine reads her collar, and finds herself at the home of Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintigant), a retired judge and practicing cynic. He tells her to just take Rita, a level of callousness that staggers her. Don’t worry dog lovers; Rita survives. One day at a park, though, she tears off and races back to Joseph’s house. This sparks what is surely one of the strangest relationships imaginable and I don’t mean a romantic one. Valentine seeks to humanize Joseph and he makes her aware of her self-worth, a slanted look at fraternity. Valentine also shames the judge into giving up an illegal habit–not drugs, though they are a plot device–and he desires for her the courage to tread a path he never took to avoid the guilt he has harbored for decades.
There is a parallel story about a young man studying to be a judge with his own relationship woes and despair. Rouge is shot full of abandonment issues, inner anguish, the need to let go of things one can’t change, and lots of scrumptious red. You will notice that Valentine is only person in the trilogy to help the old woman deposit her bottles, but the harrowing, moving, and poignant ending–based loosely on a real event–brings the series full circle. I admired Kieslowski’s courage in tailoring such an unusual narrative. Is Irène Jacob luminous? Like the red backdrop to her water-soaked hair. Like the way dreams sometimes come true.
Rob Weir
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