Series Minded: Three Colours Trilogy

Three Colours: Blue (1993)
Three Colours: White (1994)
Three Colours: Red (1994)
d. Krzysztof Kieślowski - DVD

I first encountered noted Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy at a film festival in my hometown of Thunder Bay back in the mid-1990s. My extremely hazy recollection is of seeing two of the three films, and having my burgeoning film buff's mind completely tantalized by the very narrow connectedness of the films, and being keen to see how the third of the trilogy fit.  At this stage, I don't even remember which two of the three films I had seen. I want to say Red for sure, because there's an image from that film, used on the poster and the DVD cover, that I used as an art exercise, and so it lives larger in my mind than the others. But it's also very possible that Red was the one I hadn't seen, just the one I was looking forward to seeing.

When the trilogy was released on DVD (according to some bot, it was in March 2003) I snapped it up... and never bothered to sit down and watch the films. 23 years later, the impulse finally hit me while looking through my physical media binders and contemplating the DVDs I have acquired yet never watched. What is the deal with the Three Colours Trilogy? I watched all three over two days and I had to wonder if I had ever seen any of them. There was barely a spark of recognition, but it was tantamount to watching them all anew.

It turns out Blue is a tragedy, White a comedy, and Red a romance... sort of. Each evokes the idea of their core genre, but refuses to play into the tropes of them. 

In Blue, the hauntingly beautiful Juliette Binoche is Julie, who, in the opening moments of the film, is in a car accident as a result of brake failure, and she loses her child and her husband. She is understandably devastated, and attempts to take her own life in the hospital but is apologetic for not being able to follow through. Her husband was an exceptionally famous composer, and was supposed to be writing the theme for the reunification of Europe when he died. Julie, it's been hinted, was perhaps the secret to his success. But Julie wants nothing more than to burn her old life to the ground and live a new life as a ghost, just invisible to the world. One's past, though, is not so easily escaped, and trying to avoid human connection is such an unnatural state that it somehow only draws certain people closer to you.

The magnificence of Blue, my favourite of the trio, is how Kieślowski provides you information visually long before he tells you via character or dialogue. In the opening scene, his very Frankenheimer-esque camerawork on Julie's family car gives us one particular shot of something leaking fluid, and given the position on the car, the break line is the only reasonable conclusion. It's not presented with any foreboding, it is but an image among many.  Similarly, given the thoughts of strings and horns and percussions that seem to plague Julie, it's evident early on that her mind is working through composing. Long before it's suggested by a reporter that rumours are she's the real talent behind her dead husband's success, we understand that she's absolutely a key part of it (though it's more complicated than him taking credit for her work).

Unlike some of the dead child misery porn films that came before and after Blue, Kieślowski isn't interested in wallowing in Julie's grief. It is her guide wire for sure, seemingly all she's hanging onto, but Kieślowski teases out the life Julie left behind like it's a great mystery, and he's fascinated by the idea of attempting to completely disassociate from one's past, and how genuinely impossible that challenge seems. 

I thought that Blue, being the first of the trilogy to be released, would be a tone-setter, but it's not. White opens up in a French courtroom proceeding that finds Polish national Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) pleading for his French bride Dominique (Julie Delpy) not to divorce him, but everything is completely lost in translation (this courtroom scene is heard from behind closed doors in Blue when Julie tries to enter and is rebuffed, a moment viewed here from a different perspective). Dominique is hot-tempered and, apparently, pretty horny (as Karol spies her with another man the very next night in her home). She takes everything away from Karol (including his passport) and leaves him stranded in Paris with nothing but his suitcase which contains scant few clothes and his hairdressing tools. Down on his luck, begging for change, Karol meets Mikolaj, a fellow Pole, who offers to help him smuggle him out of the country back home.

After a few shenanigans, Karol is back home, living and working at his eponymous salon with his brother and sharing the apartment upstairs, but Karol is unsatisfied. He wants more. He starts working as a lookout for a black market money man, then catches on to a real estate scheme which he horns in on. From there he builds up a shipping empire for himself, all, it turns out, so he can fake his death and get Dominique to come to his funeral and admit she still has feelings for him... and then frame her for his murder.

I really couldn't tell if White was supposed to be a comedy or merely comedic. It's conceptually quite droll, but Zamachowski and Kieślowski keep the whole scenario pretty subdued when it could so easily be quite broad and farcical. I'm not sure I would have preferred it more were it punching up, but it's also so rare for a comedy like this, which finds a man so down on his luck turn it all around with, really, no ill repercussions. And then for the punchline to be that Karol had done everything, this whole time, years basically, to ostensibly one-up Dominique. The masculine quest for money and power always seems rooted in insecurity, and here it's Karol's inability to satisfy the woman of his dreams, and he can never let that go. The film tries to present Karol's grand gesture as something ridiculous but romantic, instead though in a modern lens it's just a bright spotlight of toxic masculinity and at least a smidge of misogyny. Karol's fragile ego needs to not only conquer Dominique sexually, but to depower her, cage her and contain her.  

But Kieślowski doesn't let Karol off the hook. The final moments of the film find Karol, still officially dead, bribing his way into the penitentiary to look up at Dominique in her cell. She spies him and smiles, before quickly dropping the smile making a series of gestures that are left for the audience to interpret (as good a final moment as the whisper at the end of Lost in Translation for leaving the view much to ponder). My take is that Dominique is telling him that they could be together now, except that for them to be together, he has to reveal he faked his death for her to be free, and he would then be charged and imprisoned.  So who is the prisoner? White definitely has its moments, but it's my least favourite of the trilogy, because it falls flat as a comedy and Karol's turn into a rich prick isn't satisfying in the slightest.

Red, the film I was most eager to watch (revisit??) finds part-time model (and student, apparently, even though she's never seen at school) Valentine (Irène Jacob) gaining a new perspective on the world after she runs over a lost dog. The dog is injured but okay, and Valentine seeks out its owner, only to find a lonely, miserable old man, an ex-judge named Joseph (Jean-Louis Trintignant) with little interest in the dog. He tells her to keep it, which she does. But a few days later the dog runs away from her and heads back home, where she discovers the old man (who, let's be fair, seems like he's in his mid-to-late 50's, but is presented as "old man") has a rig set up to listen to his neighbours phone calls. Her disgust at his invasion of privacy winds up leading to an unexpected friendship between them, as Joseph softens with a paternal affection for the young woman who reminds him of a lost love.

Concurrently, we keep checking in on Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit) a young man around Valentine's age that lives in her neighbourhood and was dating one of Joseph's neighbours whom he was spying on. Auguste also has a dog, and is studying for his law degree, and is completely unaware that his girlfriend is cheating on him (Joseph) however, is quite aware. As we learn more about Joseph's past, it presents parallels to Auguste's present. In a film where the bond that Valentine and Joseph start to establish would typically be a romantic one, instead the intonation is that Auguste is Valentine's destined beau. He would be everything that draws her to Joseph, only young and handsome and not so jaded by the world.  The serendipity of their relationship never actually happens on screen. Red is a romance that is all build-up, all implied, but much like in Blue how Kieślowski manages to give us all the information we need visually, here he use the visual orchestration of a scene, the constant near misses of Valentine and Auguste passing each other by, and the parallels in storytelling, one a verbal recounting of one's past, the other the immediate present tense of one's life, to connect everything together.

It's then too bad that Valentine is just kind of a passenger in all this fate weaving. Where Juliette Binoche was front and center in practically every frame of Blue, and Julie Delpy was kind of an object of desire and not a character, here Irène Jacob is sort of trapped between these two extremes. She's the gravitational point of the film, but her character is underdeveloped and somewhat underserved by the forces of fate swirling around her. Like with Karol in White, Valentine's journey isn't a straightforward one. Karol's objective isn't revealed until late in the film (though in hindsight it's evident it's his motivating factor all along), for Valentine, she just doesn't seem to know her path, what she wants to do (modeling does not seem to be a passion, and we never learn what she's going to school for), what her life should be, until deep into the last act when she decides to take a trip and to tell her emotionally manipulative boyfriend (only ever heard on the phone or answering machine) to get lost.  Her meeting with Auguste takes place just after the final frame of the film. Both of them (along with Karol and Dominique and Julie and a few others) are the only survivors of a tragic ferry accident crossing from France to England.  The message here is that 1400 people had to die in order for Valentine and Auguste to finally meet.  Pretty warped stuff.

My expectation for the Three Colours Trilogy was that there would be a consistency in them, that they would be tonally similar, or playing in the same genre, or there would be visual cues connecting them. There is a recurring theme about the how we approach our pasts and how the past circles back upon us that I think might take repeat viewings or additional concentrated analysis to fully grasp. 

The sense of colour usage, while clearly thought out, didn't elicit a very strong reaction from me. Red seemed to use its colour theory the most broadly. The use of red was, in a way, the connecting points between Valentine and Auguste, foreshadowing romance... kind of. White was mainly used in White in Karol's recollections of Dominique, mostly on their wedding day. In Blue, the only object Julie kept from her past life was a blue crystal chandelier from her child's room, and it illuminates the moments when the unfinished symphony haunts her.  The colour of the Three Colours Trilogy was a lot more subtle than I anticipated.  

As a comics geek, what I was looking forward to most was the idea of a shared universe between these three films, them all taking place in the same space and time. They do, but not to any satisfying degree. The thread of connection between Blue and White of that one extremely brief crossover means absolutely nothing of relevance to either story, and the way Red brings all three together through a ferry accident verges on ludicrous and a total deus ex machina. The main other connected thread in each movie is the bent lady. In each film, the main character witness a little old lady with a deep hunch doing a slow shuffle step towards the massive centralized bottle recycling bin. In each scene the woman, unable to lift her head up, strains to reach up and put the empty wine bottle in the bin (it always gets stuck half in, half out). It's a different moment in each movie (not the same moment from a different perspective) but it's only Valentine who comes to her aide, and it speaks to each character who they are in that moment.  It's better connective tissue, but still completely disconnected from the plot or themes. It's just shared space.

Blue is excellent, Red is quite good, White is frustrating but kind of good, and together, as a trilogy, it makes the weaknesses of each worthwhile. The DVDs are loaded with commentary, critical analysis, and Kieślowski retrospectives. I've barely scratched the surface on them (don't scratch the discs!) but there's plenty of material I'm keen to dive into. These were Kieślowski's last directorial efforts (he would complete another script before passing away in 1996), and next to The Dekalog this is considered his great triumph in what I've heard is a pretty stellar carreer. More to explore.