The third installment to director
Krzysztof Kieslowski’s trilogy "Three Colours:
Blue,
White,
Red." A dramatic film that is rated R and lasts for one hour and 40 minutes. Red was released in 1994 and is in
French, with
subtitles. Starring
Irene Jacob,
Jean-Louis Trintignant,
Frederique Feder and
Jean-Pierre Lorit.
The colored collection of films is based on the colors of the French flag and their meaning: Blue = liberty, White = equality, and Red = fraternity. Kieslowski looks to explore these ideals, along with much more in these films, questioning their practicality and the contradictions they offer. In this chapter, the young Valentine (Jacob), a fashion model, meets a retired judge (Trintignant) after injuring his dog by accidentally running over him in the street. Joseph Kern (the judge) doesn’t seem to care much about the dog, and tells Valentine to keep him. She does, but the dog runs away and returns to Kern’s place. When Valentine searches for him and ends up back at the judge’s, she discovers that Kern secretly spies on people by way of tapping into their phone conversations.
A particular couple Kern is spying on is Auguste (Lorit) and Karin (Feder), who appear to be in love with each other, but trouble is awaiting them. The viewer also learns that Auguste’s life is extremely similar to Kern’s years before, which is why Kern finds spying on them so compelling. Though eventually both Kern and Auguste find themselves compelled by Valentine as well.
This film explores the themes of fate and love, and is eventually interwoven with the previous two stories in Blue and White, with all of the main characters returning for one particularly powerful scene. Like the other films, the mise-en-scene of Red is bathed in the title’s color, spewing forth a terrific (and eye-pleasing) bombardment of symbolism. The music in this film compliments the atmosphere (as seen best in Blue and not so much in White), and the performances of Irene Jacob (seen also in Kieslowski’s “The Double Life of Veronique”) and the rest of the cast is terrific.
Red was actually the first of the three films I saw, and it blew me away with it’s rich cinematic power and underlying subtlety of the complexity of life and possible destiny. (Yikes, I sound as though I’m in film class again!) Though Blue is my favorite of the three (the raw emotion in that one is unmatched- in my opinion), Red is a close second and ranks very high on my list as one of the best films I’ve seen. I certainly recommend this film, along with the other two, as well. Of course it’s best to view them in order, but each stand marvelously well on their own.