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Blue
viewed 6.11.00 on VHS 
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White
viewed 6.10.00 on VHS
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Red
viewed 6.9.00 on
VHS
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Krystof Kieslowski's final
statement on the state of humankind in the 90s is
bracketed by disaster, but between the two cataclysmic
bookends is a transformation of the mood of Kieslowski's
post-Communist Europeans from nihilism and isolation to
hope and brotherhood. The extent to which this
vision rings true depends on the extent to which one
accepts Kieslowski's many stylistic indulgences, from
the endless coincidences to the dominant color schemes
following each film's respective title color. A
lot of it seems too slick and contrived to be in tune to
the truly "human", but I tend to believe that
the effort is earnest in principle.
I had mistaken White to be
the first of the trilogy -- but it actually works quite
well as the lead. Watching the beautiful but
ponderous Blue first probably would have
discouraged me from continuing. White is
certainly the lightest of the three, following a jilted
Polish immigrant out of Paris and back to his homeland,
where he schemes to exact his revenge on his ex-wife
through the greatest revenge of all:
success. The plot moves quickly through an
engaging series of dealings and stealings as the
protagonist, Karol Karol ("Karol" is the
Polish for "Charlie", evoking a similar
comic/pathetic hero) works his way up from penniless
barber to factory owner in a matter of months.
Makes you want to stand up and cheer for the new
capitalism that broke through the Iron Curtain a little
more than a decade ago. The motivation for Karol's
upward mobility brings the story into the bizarre realm
of allegory: his French wife dumped him because he
couldn't consummate his marriage. Could it be that
for Karol, money-making is his Viagra, his way of
capturing the capitalist male wet dream of Julie Delpy,
an impossibly beautiful advertisement image of a
wife? The climax and final image complicate this
conundrum, leaving Easterner and Westerner, consumer and
consumed, at a stalemate.
Blue to me feels like the
most obviously pretentious of the three, with its heavy
doses of melancholy punctuated by orchestral outbursts
signaling the arrival of every revelation in the
plot. What gives the movie its soul is
Juliette Binoche's go-for-broke performance as a wife
and mother who has lost husband and family in a car
crash, and is suddenly faced with a life of no duties,
and seemingly no hope. The process in which she
rebuilds her life and develops herself into a free
entity, while integrating herself as a member of
society, is fabulous to watch if only for Binoche's
sensitivity at every turn in her character's
voyage. Along the way, her composer husband's
incomplete final work, which was to be performed at a
ceremony celebrating the European Union, figures in the
plot. I found both this and the actual music to be
more gimmicky than genuinely meaningful -- the symphony
sounds like the generic crap played at sporting events.
Red, the warmest of the
three, is where most of Kieslowski's ideas come to
fruition. Most successfully demonstrated is the
tapestry of modern society and the pendulum swings of
people's continuing encounters and separations from each
other. Irene Jacob is a do-gooder model
who by way of an injured dog becomes involved with a
lonely, bitter retired judge who eavesdrops on the daily
dramas of his neighbors. The transformations they
instill in each other take place almost unnoticeably
through the course of the film and is worth tracking
through multiple viewings. Red concludes with a surprising
coincidence that may amount to nothing significant.
Absorbing and oddly hip, as if it
were a European intellectual’s extended version of Pulp
Fiction, the Trois Coleurs trilogy tries to express
the 90s state of post-modern Europe with a definitively
90s aesthetic of commercial slickness selling narrative
contrivances as New Age spiritual fast food for an
audience apparently starving from alienation. For
the most part, it hits the spot; but we shall see how
quickly appetites shall change.
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