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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