Three Colors Trilogy (Blue / White / Red)
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Benoît Régent, Charlotte Véry, Florence Pernel, Hélène Vincent, Juliette BinocheDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround; English (Original Language)
Format: Anamorphic, Box set, Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 219 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-03-04
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Miramax
Movie Reviews of Three Colors Trilogy (Blue / White / Red)
Movie Review: Why I Love Film
Summary: 5 Stars
High-concept filmmaking can be a dangerous endeavor. Too often, directors get overly bogged down in their own ideas or alienate their audiences with over-the-top stylization or sheer pretention. However, The Decalouge (a ten part television series dealing with the Ten Commandments, released in Poland in 1988) proved that Krzysztof Kieslowski was one of a rare breed. Along with writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz, he's able to fully dramatize his ideas and frame them with such visual and aural flair that harkens back to the golden age of filmmaking. So it fits that for his final project, he took on the unusual task of creating three films for France's bicentennial - each dealing with one of the colours on the French flag, and its corresponding attribute.
The first film in the trilogy is Blue, which is meant to represent freedom. Blue is the story of Julie (Juliette Binoche), the wife of a famous composer who had been creating a piece to commemorate the unification of Europe. However, at the beginning of the film, her husband and five year old daughter are killed in a car crash. Unable to bring herself to suicide, Julie instead leaves her former life behind in an only semi-successful attempt to reinvent herself, despite the love of a colleauge of her husband's, Olivier (Benoit Regent).
The second film (often argued to be the weakest) is White, symbolizing equality. White tells us of Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a polish man living in France. His french wife Dominique (Julie Deply) divorces him after only six months because he is impotent and even frames him for arson. Having lost everything, he returns to Poland, where a suicidal friend named Mikolai (Janusz Gajos) helps him create a strange revenge against his lover.
The final film (and by far the strongest) is Red, representing the ideal of fraternity. In Red, Valentine (Irene Jacob), a Swiss model living in Paris stumbles across an elderly retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who uses surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on his neighbours. Instead of being repelled, her nature causes her to form an unlikely friendship with this man, and their bond has echoes beyond themselves - most notably with Valentine's young neighbour, a fellow Swiss citizen named Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit).
Stylistically, each entry is unique. Blue is a stark tragedy, laced with long visual takes and very deliberately spoken dialouge. The score of the film - a haunting and delicate affair by Zbigniew Preisner - was written before the film was shot, so that the action could move to the pace of the music. This is an unusual technique, but it works gloriously and fits in context of the story, since music is this film's "MacGuffin," if you will - it's the way the characters communicate what they are unable to say. Juliette Binoche is really the only STAR of the film - she gets almost all the screen time and her performance is nuanced and restrained. She reveals Julie very slowly and very strongly fleshes out the grieving process one goes through in reaction to such a devestating event.
White, on the other hand, is a comedy, albiet with the blackest of spirits a comedy could have. Karol's antics are sometimes almsot Chaplin-esuqe; witness the scene in which he attempts to hide a gun in his pants. Zamachowski's Karol is both a fun, intruigiung character and a bitter, unsympathetic anti-hero, often at the same time, and he's matched by Julie Deply's performance. Her icy beauty belies a chaotic underside that manifests itself occasionally, as when she torches her salon to get Karol out of it. Edward Klosinski's cinematography accentuates the subtext of the film - the bright idealised colours of the Parisian streets are contrasted with the cold, but somehow more real browns, whites and grays of Poland.
Red, however, is the masterpiece. Neither tragedy, nor comedy, it's a tale of the human spirit - Piesiewicz called it "a film against indifference." It uses such devices as telephones, dogs and carefully shot near-encounters to tell the story of isolated lives. Irene Jacob's Valentine is the idealisation of the modern woman (person, really). She lives alone, her boyfriend is across the channel, her work friends don't truly understand her nature, and yet she is optimistic, sweet and honestly believes in the good in people. Her connection with the Judge is important for both of them. The casting of one time hot-male-lead Trintignant is clearly conscious. Now robbed of the vitality he once had, Valentine gives him a second chance as much as he reveals herself to herself. I wish I could say more, but I really wouldn't want to give the awesome nature of this story away. Visually speaking it's also the warmest film of the three and the use of light throughout is magnificent - there's a scene in which the characters stand in the light of the Judge's old house that's absolutely breathtaking.
Although one could view the three films individually, it's only as a whole that they truly make sense, and noting the connections - both cinematically and symbolically - is one of the best parts of the series. For example, all three films begin with a sense of motion, shrouded in the colour the film deals with. Blue opens with a shot underneath a speeding motorcar on a cold, rainy day. White follows a particular suitcase of note as it moves down a conveyor belt at the Warsaw airport. Red moves us along telephone lines, tracing the path of a missed connection. Likewise, each film concludes with one of it's central characters looking at the camera through a glass of some kind.
The nature of all three films, however, is about love. Blue and White are both somewhat harsh in their treatment - freedom clearly comes with a price, and the power struggles inherent in equality can lead to more conflict than they're worth. Julie is shedding her past and Karol is getting revenge - both antagonistic actions, but Valentine - even when faced with a repulsive character, as the Judge originally seems, is willing to look for the best in someone. Fraternity is about forming real human connections - a deep form of love that's what's truly valuable. This is illustrated best in one of the most concrete connections between the three films: each of the main characters encounters an elderly woman trying to fit a bottle into a recycling bin she cannot quite reach. While Julie and Karol both only watch, even if with a real human interest, Valentine is the only one of the three who helps her. The end of Red, however, gives us all hope. Without giving too much away, three couples - one from each film - are united amidst the most tragic of circumstances - saved from doom by fate or chance or God or whatever you believe - and their meeting ties up the ideals of all three films into one amazing package.
Movies like this are the reason I love movies. They're visually beautiful, dramatically accomplished and honest-to-God moving. If you can only see one, Red is one of the best films of the 1990s, but all three are VERY highly reccomended.
Summary of Three Colors Trilogy (Blue / White / Red)
Even though one can view each segment of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy on its own, it seems absurd to do so; why buy the slacks instead of the entire suit? Created by Kieslowski and his writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz for France's bicentennial, the titles--and the themes of the films--come from the three colors of the French flag representing liberty, equality, and fraternity. Blue examines liberation through the eyes of a woman (Juliette Binoche) who loses her husband and daughter in an auto accident, and solemnly starts anew. White is an ironic comedy about a befuddled Polish husband (Zbigniew Zamachowski) who takes an odd path of revenge against his ex-wife (Julie Delpy). A Swiss model (Irène Jacob) strikes up a friendship with a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who eavesdrops on his neighbors in Red. The trilogy is a snapshot of European life at a time of reconstruction after the Cold War, reflected through Kieslowski's moralist view of human nature and illumined by each title's palate color.The DVD set has numerous extras spread throughout the three discs; the end result is a superior collection. Each disc has a short retrospective, culled together from new interviews with Kieslowski's crew, plus film critic Geoff Andrew, biographer Annette Insdorf (who also does the commentaries), and fellow Polish director Ageniska Holland. Producer Marin Karmitz also reminisces about the experience. There's an exceptional effort to show the magic of Kieslowski (who died two years after the trilogy) through a discussion of his various career phases, interviews with the three lead actresses, four student films, and archival materials including simple--and wonderful--glimpses of the director at work. Excellent insight is also provided by Dominique Rabourdin's filmed "cinema lessons" with Kieslowski. Without viewing any of his other films, this set illustrates the uniqueness of Kieslowski. --Doug Thomas
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