"TROIS COULEURS" (Movie analysis from Krzysztof Kieslowski)

"Men of all countries are brothers, he who oppresses
 one nation declares himself the enemy of all."- 1793 French Declaration of Rights

INTRODUCTION

Blue, white, and red are the colors of the French flag, and the story of each film is based on one of the three political ideals in the motto of the French Republic: liberty, equality, fraternity.

“The words <liberté, egalité, fraternité> are French because the money (to make the films) is French. If the money had been of a different nationality we would have titled the films differently, or they might have had a different cultural connotation. But the films would probably have been the same.” - Krzysztof Kieslowski, Oxford University student newspaper.

The trilogy is also interpreted respectively as an anti-tragedy, an anti-comedy, and an anti-romance. "Blue" is the anti-tragedy, "White" is the anti-comedy, and "Red" is the anti-romance. All three films hook us with immediate narrative interest.

Juliette Binoche, in Bleu, has the liberty, after her loss of husband and child, to start life again, or not at all. Zbigniew Zamachowski, in Blanc, is dropped by his beautiful wife after he goes to a great deal of trouble to move her to Paris. Back home in Poland, he wants to make millions so that he can be her equal, and have his revenge. Valentine and the old judge in Rouge have a fraternity of souls that springs across barriers of time and gender because they both have the imagination to appreciate what could have been.

Although he always wrote with Piesiewicz, curiously Kieslowski usually used a different cinematographer for every film; he didn't want them to look as if they matched.

Lives are not about stories, stories are about lives. That is the difference between films for children and films for adults. Kieslowski celebrates intersecting timelines and lifelines, choices made and unmade. All his films ask why, since God gave us free will, movie directors go to such trouble to take it away.

BLEU (1993)

According to Kieslowski, the subject of the film is liberty, specifically emotional liberty, rather than its social or political meaning. Set in Paris, the film is about a woman whose husband and child are killed in a car accident. Suddenly set free from her familiar bonds, she attempts to cut herself off from everything and live in isolation, but finds that she cannot free herself from human connections.

This movie begins with a car crash on a remote highway, witnessed by a teenage boy who will later make contact with the only survivor. It is simultaneously the least spectacular and most real car crash imaginable.

This movie represents the thematic in its lighting and aesthetical components as being “mixed up” with the colors red and white, although its majority of light setting is blue and for some reason, green and red. The compositional elements that are found in this movie are to play with the contrast of elements that each color represents and how they all tell a specific story about the entire plot summary of it.

BLANC (1994)

I really liked this movie, because it reminds me of me and my current relationship breaking apart because of the distance and complications that might be involved due to life.

There is a sequence in this movie where Karo is so desperately homesick in Paris that he arranges to be sent back to Warsaw, curled up inside a suitcase. His friend at the other end watches the airport conveyor belt with horror: The bag is not there, it has been stolen by thieves who break the lock, find only the little man, beat him savagely and throw him on a rubbish heap. Staggering to his feet, he looks around, bloody but triumphant, and cries out, "Home at last!"

This movie uses a lot of “white” colors and light contrast to represent the perspective of “marriage and traveling” and also the components of a great color balance without overexpose the character’s behaviors.

Strangely, this film has one of the biggest laughs I have heard in the cinema, admittedly a cinema with a rarefied clientele. With no money and no passport, Karol plans to get back home by hiding in an enormous trunk and simply being stowed in the hold of a plane as luggage.

ROUGE (1994)

Valentine, a student and part-time fashion model in Geneva, plagued by calls from her controlling and jealous boyfriend in England. A quirk of fate causes her to call upon a cantankerous and retired judge who spies on his neighbor’s phone calls, not for money but to feed his cynicism. The film is the story of relationships between some human beings, Valentine and the judge, but also other people who may not be aware of the relationship they have with Valentine or/and the old judge. Redemption, forgiveness and compassion are important elements that can be found in this story.

The length of time dramatized in the film is the length of the ad campaign: the huge image is put up at a street intersection at the beginning of the film, and taken down by workmen at the end.

There are important red color elements that can be found in this movie, especially when describing Valentine’s emotional impact among the feeling of striking Joseph’s dog, or the lighting used to create the “stop signals, the car, the chairs, the outfits, etc.”

CONCLUSION

Kieslowski would have understood. A link between all three films in the trilogy is provided by a brief shot of an old lady trying to deposit a bottle in a street trash-recycling bin. The slot is a little too high for her to reach. In "Red," Valentine tries to help her. The first two movies are set in Paris. What is the old lady doing in Geneva? Exactly!

The trilogy shifts gear from high tragedy to low comedy to intense drama in a world of coincidence: it is variously sentimental, grandiose, sexy, intriguing. The movies are shot through with moments of bizarre black comedy, anxiety and cynicism about Europe itself.

With a little effort, the relevance of each can be detected in each film, but as Kieslowski himself cheerfully conceded, these concepts were there because the production funding was French.

The real themes of the trilogy are more disparate, more chaotic, less high-minded, and far more interesting: the unending torture of love, the inevitability of deceit, the fascination of voyeurism and the awful potency of men's fear of women.

They are about entirely different people in different cities, though there are little overlapping, disorientating touches in which the leading character of one film is glimpsed in cameo in another, a technique which effectively points up everything that is being presented on screen.

What on earth have these people and these stories got to do with each other? At first glance, the final moments of Three Colors: Red would seem to provide an explanation to be applied retrospectively in a backstory "twist".

Troi Coulours Trilogy was much swooned-over at the time for its ambient stylishness and sexiness, but I think this is the aspect which dates it. Much more interesting is to see it as an exotic hothouse flower, or perhaps a gigantic, puzzling three-part installation, resplendent with its own self-confident strangeness and beauty. Just to watch one single film deprives you of the flavor. Perhaps it is best not taken entirely seriously, you have to see the drama, even at its most exalted or tragic or erotic, as something satirical. Perhaps it is best, heretically, to watch the films out of sequence. Work outwards from White (my favorite of the three) the trilogy's black comic center, and savor Karol staggering joyfully out of his suitcase, euphorically re-born with nothing.