This triptych (Trois couleurs), came out in 1993 and 1994, and is the last work of Polish film-maker Krzysztof Kieslowski (1941-96).

In Blue (my favourite of the three), we meet Julie (Juliette Binoche), who loses her famous composer husband and young daughter in a car accident, and reacts by selling everything, moving to Paris, and trying to cut herself off from the past. But she finds that life keeps calling her back, in the shape of neighbours with needs, witnesses with stories, and -- in particular -- Olivier (Benoit Regent), a collaborator of her husband's, who has obviously always carried a torch for her, and wants to finish, with her help, the work the composer left incomplete.

White (my least favourite) introduces us to Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a Polish hairdresser living in Paris, whose world collapses when his French wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy) divorces him. Impoverished and alienated, he engineers, with the help of a fellow Pole, a clandestine return to his country, where he gets rich (by means of somewhat shady schemes), and resolves to avenge himself on Dominique. By faking his own death, and making her the beneficiary of his will, he lures her to Poland. He then has her arrested, and imprisoned on charges of murder.

In Red we meet Valentine (Irene Jacob), who by chance makes the acquaintance of Joseph (Jean-Louis Trintignant). A retired judge and convinced misanthrope, he spends his time eavesdropping on his neighbours via a sophisticated phone-tapping system. Valentine's horrified reaction galvanizes him to come clean about his clandestine activities, while her warm personality enables him to form a friendship with her. Partly as a result of his influence, she ends up on the same Channel ferry as Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit), a young law student whose tribulations mirror very closely those of the judge as a young man.

The final scene of Red pulls the trilogy together. Only seven survivors are pulled from a capsized Channel ferry -- an unknown barman, Julie and Olivier from Blue (so they stayed together), Karol and Dominique from White (they seem to have patched up their differences), and from the final story, Auguste, and then Valentine (not together yet, but perhaps destined to be so).


Colours in Tonga, 2000

The three colours -- blue, white, and red -- represent the colours of the French flag, and speak, respectively, of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Kieslowski attributes the idea to his scriptwriter, Krzysztof Piesiewicz. "We wanted to see," he says, "how these three words function today on a human, intimate, and personal level, rather than a philosophical, political, or social one." And true: Blue explores what liberty means (can you really be free if you are cut off from the world?); White looks at the prerequisites for equality (what effect do discrepancies of citizenship status and personal wealth have on the individual?); and Red revolves around fraternity (how can you show solidarity with people who have been damaged by the past?)

But, of course, the agent always coexists with -- and interacts with -- the structure. So, as Tim Brayton perceptively points out, "The other thing Three Colors is clearly About, besides the revolutionary motto, is the state of Europe after the collapse of the Soviet empire."

True again. Watching these movies now, getting on for 30 years later, you kind of forget how very recent the fall of the Iron Curtain was when they were made... But the evolving entity of Europe (west, east, and "neutral") is centre-stage in them all.



A vital plot element in Blue is the composition of an anthem for European unity, to be played in twelve countries simultaneously. This is one of the things that Julie tries to run away from (and there is the suggestion -- left hanging -- that she may have written more of the famous composer's music than has heretofore been acknowledged). But on what kind of liberty will this European unity be based? The kind that locks itself away, or the kind that makes itself available to carry out acts of kindness?

Brayton sums up: "Blue is, then, the story of how to become a new, better, more whole self, whether as a single person or an entire continent, and learning how to prevent past trauma from infecting the present. There is nothing less tragic than that."

"It is wholly characteristic of Kieslowski," says David Polanski, in a very perceptive essay, "to treat liberty with such ambiguity. His remarks on post-Soviet liberalization in Poland were scathing: 'Things have changed for the worse. That’s why former eastern bloc countries are electing communists again. We are missing them and longing for the times we cursed before.' This was not the complaint of a fellow traveler but of a thinker who was well aware of the impact of political structures on personal relations. He adds: 'I hated the communists and still hate them. But I do long for various friendships and ties that used to exist and don’t anymore. The camaraderie of old times has gone.'"



White, meanwhile, looks at migration in a Europe that is far from unified or egalitarian. For Polanski, it's "a merciless satire of post-shock therapy capitalism". And it's worth quoting his assessment at length:

"It is only in haughty France that [Karol] is rendered impotent: a humble easterner with the homely name of Karol Karol, subservient to his wife, Dominique Vidal -- as perfectly French a name as can be imagined -- all impossibly cool Gallic sophistication and style... When Karol later begs her to return with him to Poland, she sneers, 'I’ll never go to Poland.'... In a wonderful bit of irony, he plans to achieve equality by mastering the tools of the West, embarking on a scheme that would have been impossible under the communist regime... In the end, he turns the tables on Dominique as well, trapping her in Poland where she is now at the mercy of laws she doesn’t understand, and where newly corrupt institutions are easily subverted by a man of his means.

"It seems, though, that it is not really equality he seeks, but mastery, a condition he achieves through an ingeniously plotted revenge. Or, as Kieslowski himself put it, referring to a Communist-era Polish expression: 'I don’t think anybody really wants to be equal. Everybody wants to be more equal.' The haughty West is finally humbled by the savvy East, grown wiser under the former’s cruel tutelage. But the final shot of the film is not celebratory but tragic: rather than revel in his cleverly orchestrated victory over his faithless ex-wife, Karol weeps silently as he gazes up at her luminous face. Like Julie with liberty, he finds formal equality unachievable and gains a superiority that he doesn’t want."



Red is set in neutral Switzerland (as opposed to old-liberal France or old-communist Poland), and it riffs on the ideal of fraternity or solidarity. Polansky: "We want fraternity, it seems, but Kieslowski gives us none of its obvious political associations: tribalism, nationalism, the violent brotherhood of terrorist cells... Its vision is closer to the universal fraternity promised by Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy... But Kieslowski’s humanism is cooler, more ironic than Schiller’s, tempered perhaps by knowledge of the intervening two centuries. If we are all bound together, it is not by an emotional experience of superabundant joy, but by something more elusive and perhaps more terrible. I have no idea how to see the sinking of the ferry at the conclusion of Red, with its shocking loss of life, other than as a kind of stand-in for the cataclysmic events of modern European history... Indeed, looking back from the end of the Cold War, late modernity as a whole looks like a cataclysm for Europe."

He summarizes: "These films have been called anti-tragedy, anti-comedy, and anti-romance, but what they really are is anti-ideological. One has the sense that they were created during that brief window in which history had ended but the end of history had not. This was marked by a kind of simultaneous exhaustion with grand ideological movements and optimism about what might replace them."

In the years since the Three Colours films were released, Europe-wide fraternity, it seems, has proved ever more elusive. It has not yet proved possible to transcend national goals and identity. Polansky, from his 2020 vantage-point, concludes: "And here Europe stands, awaiting some version of political fraternity that is neither insipid nor horrific. Put not your faith in princes. Kieslowski would have understood."



Interesting, that... "Kieslowski would have understood." Curiously, Roger Ebert voices the same idea, but with regard to time, which is another of the themes running through the movies (time variously strengthens, hardens, and softens people; time stands still, repeats itself, overlaps). "Kieslowski celebrates intersecting timelines and lifelines, choices made and unmade," says Ebert. But there is always the possibility of transcendence. "I connect strongly with Kieslowski," he goes on, "because I sometimes seek a whiff of transcendence by revisiting places from earlier years. I am thinking now of a cafe in Venice, a low cliff overlooking the sea near Donegal, a bookstore in Cape Town and Sir John Soane's breakfast room in London. I am drawn to them in the spirit of pilgrimage. No one else can see the shadows of my former and future visits there, or know how they are the touchstones of my mortality, but if some day as I approach the cafe, I see myself just getting up to leave, I will not be surprised to have missed myself by so little. Kieslowski would have understood."

Viewing the Three Colours series offered us our own little time-machine moment, but in our case, the recording equipment had done a little autonomous editing... We knew we'd seen Red, courtesy of the Dorchester Film Club, in September 1995. That's recorded in The Diary, so it's certain. We're pretty confident we've seen one or both of the others, although we can't quite recall where (and The Diary is sadly mute -- or at least requires a more sophisticated search facility to make it give up its secrets). Well, we remembered NOTHING. Actually, not quite true. Nigel remembered two scenes from close to the end of Red. Otherwise, NOTHING.

So that's a) scary; and b) a good justification for this blog.

Here, by the way, are my 1995 thoughts about Red:

"French films are definitely different. There was comparatively little dialogue, but it all carried weight and significance. The whole thing comes across as less naturalistic than an Anglo-Saxon film -- more stylized, and therefore more intense, more symbolic. The plot, too, I suppose, is stylized. The young lawyer's life, for example, follows the pattern of the old one's in a way that is fateful and less than realistic. But then that's what the film explores: the chilly levels of fate and godlikeness. The figure of the judge is a real archetypal Greek-god character -- remote, sitting above the common race of humans, sitting in judgement on them, knowing everything, making all the connections, yet indifferent, cold, lacking all compassion. It is compassion that is sparked into his life by Valentine, the model, whose tender sympathy for the lot of man thaws the judge, and makes him appear like a human being, wounded and lonely. His godlike activities continue as he knits together the lives of Valentine and the young lawyer, but they are benevolent activities as opposed to indifferent ones. Geneva comes over, in this stylized fashion, as a lonely, isolating place. The interiors all seem gloomy and forbidding, the exteriors dominated by busy roads and lots of traffic. We have the impression of lots of hived-off lives, people who are all busy with their own activities, but interacting only imperfectly with those around them. It's a film that is sad, touching, and beautiful -- that, despite its glimpse of a sort of happy ending for some, leaves one slightly cold around the heart."