Three Colors Trilogy - Blue, White, Red

The Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White, Red – Happy Birthday, Krzysztof Kieslowski!

1993-1994

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Starring: Blue: Juliette Binoche, Benoît Régent White: Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy Red: Irène Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Jean-Pierre Lorit

At the end of his career (and life), Kieslowski made this trilogy of films that are nominally (and only nominally) focused on the themes represented by the three colors in the French flag: Blue for Liberty, White for Equality, and Red for Fraternity.  Having made the highly successful Decalogue film/mini-series (ten separate “episodes” about residents of an apartment complex, each episode dealing with one of the Ten Commandments), it is easy to see why Kieslowski was similarly drawn to a series of films linked in concept.  These three films turned out to be his final work, as he died two years after filming Red.  What a testament to leave to the world of cinema.

In Blue, the first of the three films, Juliette Binoche (in a stellar performance) plays Julie Vignon, a woman who has recently lost her husband, a composer, and young daughter in a car accident.  She deals with this tragedy by attempting to shut herself off from the world.  She sells their house, their possessions, everything – she wants no reminders of her once happy life.  She seems angry when vestiges of her former life try to creep back in.  The film is very much about her healing process after the tragedy.

In White, Zbigniew Zamachowski plays Karol Karol, a Polish hairdresser whose young wife Dominique (Julie Delpy) is divorcing him for failure to consummate their marriage.  She not only divorces him, but freezes his bank account and locks him out of their home and business.  He is left with less than nothing but his continued love for his ex-wife.  He retreats to Poland where he builds up a somewhat shady business empire, then stages an elaborate ruse in order to get revenge on his ex-wife for her bitter treatment.  The film is a dark comedy.

In Red, Irène Jacob plays Valentine, a young student and model in Geneva who, through a series of events, meets a retired judge (Trintignant) who is spying on his neighbors’ phone calls.  The two form an unlikely bond despite their age and gender gap.  Simultaneously, the film introduces us to Auguste (Lorit), a young man studying to become a judge who happens to live right across the street from Valentine.  The two do not know one another but are consistently shown just missing one another in their daily lives.  The film is (among other things) a romance about the possibility of a relationship between Valentine and Auguste.

  

It’s an interesting trilogy in that it is three tremendously separate stories, not connected by common actors, characters, or even genres.  One could easily watch a single film from the trilogy and enjoy it on its own, and never watch the other two.  The three films function completely as stand-alone films. However, there is most definitely a thread that ties all three films together, and it is the central theme of human connectedness and the concept of choices versus destiny. 

SPOILER ALERT:  While I typically avoid revealing spoilers, I have thought long and hard about this and have come to the conclusion that the points I want to make about Blue, White and Red hinge upon me discussing the endings of the films.  I don’t normally like to do this, but the way Kieslowski uses narrative is critical to me in understanding his viewpoint of the world around him.  I am terribly sorry to say, then, that if you are interested in actually watching these films, and holy cow, are these terrific films,  please skip the next section.

  

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In the first two films, the main characters are desperately trying to sever connections with other people.  Julie in Blue is desperately angry at the world and responds by cutting herself off from it.  The “Liberty” of the Blue in the French flag is symbolized through Julie’s liberty – can she simply live?  Can she have liberty from her former, happy life, and reinvent herself as a single, lone person, dependent on no one?  Ultimately, the film says “No.” (And this is why I warn about spoilers.)  Julie ultimately lets people from her old life back into her world.  She takes up her husband’s compositions.  She allows herself to connect with other people.  She has spent the entirety of the film fighting this, but ultimately, she cannot disconnect herself from her life.  It is impossible.  Despite her choices, Destiny has other plans for her, and she must allow herself to feel and love again.

Karol in White is similarly trying to disconnect himself from his ex-wife, Dominique.  She has treated him so harshly, and has easily disconnected from him, but his overwhelming love for her (bordering on obsession) keeps him from forgetting her.  He wants revenge for her treatment, he wants his “Equality.”  The ruse he plays is harsh indeed – he fakes his own death, leaves her his shady business in his will, and then calls the cops on her, letting her take the fall for his illegal dealings.  She winds up in jail in Poland.  Karol, having effectively gotten his revenge, was then supposed to flee to Hong Kong and live out the rest of his life there, happy in the knowledge that he got her back; however, he cannot do that.  He cannot leave her.  He loves her.  He cannot disconnect from her, and stays in hiding in Poland, visiting the courtyard of her prison every day, gazing up at her barred windows.  Try as they might, Karol and Dominique are strongly connected to one another.  They were foolish to ever try to separate from one another.

In Red, the film is not so much about people attempting to sever connections, but rather, the formation of new ones and just how deep those new connections are.  Valentine and the old judge connect through what one can certainly call Fate – she runs over his dog, and thus goes to his house.  There she is horrified to discover he is calmly spying on his neighbors’ intimate phone conversations.  Despite all of this, she keeps coming back to his house, usually drawn by the dog in question (who lives – she didn’t seriously hurt her), and the subsequent long conversations between Valentine and the judge show her that he’s not a perverted old man, just a lonely old man.  They form an unlikely friendship, easily representing the “Fraternity” of Red in the French flag.  All the meanwhile, the film plays with the idea of the connection between Valentine and Auguste, the young judge-in-training across the street.  We are constantly shown them in the same frame, nearly missing each other.  These are two people who are almost connected to one another, but not quite.  Will Fate see fit to bring these two people together?  As Roger Ebert said in his review of the film, “What a nice couple these two people would make.”  

  

Additionally, not only is there the question about the connection between Valentine and Auguste, but also between Auguste and the old judge.  After all, Auguste is a judge in training, so they share an occupation.  Auguste and the old judge both dress similarly and both own dogs.  Kieslowski goes much further than that, however; things get really funny when the old judge starts telling Valentine stories of his youth, and wow, didn’t we see that exact same thing happen to Auguste about thirty minutes ago in the film?  We are in her shoes when Valentine asks the old judge, “Who are you?”  Are the old judge and Auguste one and the same person?  Is the old judge some sort of omnipotent soul, looking beyond his timeline into both his own past, and Auguste’s future?  Is the old judge reflecting on Valentine not as a new friend, but as a second chance at love, as the person that he missed meeting in his youth the first time around?  Is he trying to atone for his past blindness by bringing Valentine and Auguste together in this new lifetime?  Can he get Valentine and Auguste to actually meet one another when they seem to keep missing each other?  These questions are all incredibly tantalizing and, I may add, make Red my favorite of the three films. 

Something I truly loved about all three of these films, and what I hope to see more of when I delve further into Kieslowski’s catalogue, is his subversion of the concept of traditional film genres.  In Blue, a film most definitely representing tragedy and loss, we are not given the typical establishing shots of a happy family.  We never see the “before” Julie, the Julie prior to the accident.  We only know her after the accident.  We follow through her healing process, which is definitely intense and has moments of bleak sadness and long stretches of depression, but the film most definitely ends on an upper.  Julie has found a way to feel again.  It’s a tragedy that, well, isn’t.  Similarly in White, the comedy of the three, there are certainly a few moments of broad comedy and plenty of moments of dark comedy, but the film ends on a decidedly poignant and rather sad final note.  Karol has been unable to separate from Dominique.  We end the film by seeing Karol gazing up at Dominique in her cell with tears streaming down his face; not exactly a cheerful ending (although there is room for interpretation there).  And in Red, we are focusing on the “romance” between Valentine and Auguste, and yet they are both involved with other people.  They don’t even know the other exists.  They spend the entirety of the film separated from one another, only brought together in the final moments of the entire trilogy, and only brought together through an unspeakable tragedy.  They don’t have a “meet cute,” what you would expect after such a long, tantalizing buildup.  They have a “meet horrific,” which, by the way, we don’t actually SEE.  We simply see a news broadcast that shows the two of them together.  We know they have met.

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Ebert commented on this genre subversion, calling Blue the “anti-tragedy,” White the “anti-comedy,” and Red the “anti-romance.”  I don’t know if I completely agree with this.  I understand what Ebert is trying to say, but I don’t like his use of the prefix “anti-“ here.  “Anti-“ means “opposite of.”  An “anti-tragedy” would be the opposite of a tragedy, which, in simplistic genre terms, is a comedy.  Blue IS a tragedy.  A woman is grieving.  But it’s not a tragedy in the typical play-out of a tragedy.  White and Red are the exact same way – they are most certainly a comedy and a romance, respectively, but they do not follow the predetermined paths of comedies and romances.  Kieslowski is smart, so smart, he knows how to lead his audience down the primrose path and then take a hard left turn.  Honest to god, when I was watching these three films for the first time, had absolutely no idea where the films were going.  They kept me on my toes – and isn’t that a glorious thing? 

Kieslowski most definitely didn’t like giving the audience what it expected, and that was wonderfully refreshing.  For example, in Blue, Kieslowski repeatedly uses a fade to black.  We, as the audience, have been trained to understand that the fade to black represents the passage of time.  How disconcerting it is, therefore, to come back from his fade to black, only to find ourselves still in the exact same scene.  It as if the lights dimmed on the conversation, only to come up on it again.  The first time he does this, I was completely caught off guard.  By the end of the film, I loved it.  Kieslowski is using classic film language in a completely nontraditional manner.  He does this with editing and tone in Red.  When we first meet the old judge, the film is setting up everything around him to convince us that he is “evil” or “a bad man.”  We do not like him.  He is threatening.  Soon, the judge moves from threatening to romantically interested in Valentine – or is he?  Kieslowski keeps us guessing about his intentions, which is precisely the point.  Red is a romance unlike any other romance, but it is a romance nonetheless, and ditto for the other two films.  Kieslowski gives us a tragedy, a comedy, a romance, all done in a completely nontraditional manner.

  

There is a distinctly political angle to the three films as well.  Kieslowski was in favor of a unified Europe (much like we have today, but one which is currently in danger of collapsing in on itself).  His outward portrayal of such a Europe in Blue is a good 10 years before its time.  Similarly, in Red, he sets it in Switzerland but has characters in England and France, showing fluidity across borders.  Most notably, though, he shows his political hand in White, which is good, because White needs all the help it can get against the towering awesomeness of the other two films.  Poland was newly capitalist when White was made, no more than two years after the Iron Curtain had been lifted.  Karol’s relationship with Dominique can easily be viewed as allegorical, with Karol representing Poland and Dominique representing France.  Poland, finally making the switch to France’s ways, finds that France has abandoned it, and is suddenly broke and crippled in the process.  Man, if that isn’t a political statement, I don’t know what is.  Similarly, Karol viciously exploits capitalism in the film, making a buck off anything and buying nearly everything.  He swoops in on a business deal by pretending to be asleep in the back of a car.  He buys land out from under the nose of his boss in a rather slimy move, then sells it back to him at an enormous mark up.  Yes, Karol gets ahead in business this way, but he’s not really being nice about it.  And yet, that’s capitalism. 

The scores in the film are powerful.  Considering that music is a focal part of the plot in Blue, it makes sense that the music is correspondingly thrilling.  Highly reminiscent of Beethoven, yet updated for the twentieth century, Kieslowski uses it not only as background, but also as key plot points.  The music is deep, soulful, and haunting; everything you would expect to hear in a film about recovery from grief.  The score in White has two very distinct tones to it.  In the first part of the film, when Karol is being bullied by his wife, the tone is despondent – naturally.  The second he gets back to Poland, however, the tone drastically changes, to a plucky spritely tune, and it never changes back.  It’s emphasizes Karol’s commitment to his plans for revenge.  The score in Red gets increasingly tension-filled as the movie progresses yet always maintains a sense of optimism and hope, much like Valentine’s character.  I was reminded of Ravel’s Bolero, a piece which builds in complexity and power despite maintaining the same tempo and melody.  It was an apt comparison. 

 

There is so much more to say about these three films – the lighting (which is painfully beautiful), the color play (obvious, given the titles of the films, but really cool all the same), the meaning behind the few scenes that link the three films together, the concept of the god-like figure of the judge in Red, but really, I think you can, by now, discern my enthusiasm for the films.  I originally only borrowed Red from my local library.  I holed myself up in our bedroom one night and watched it.  When it ended, my jaw was on the floor, and I proceeded to immediately go downstairs and rant and rave to my husband about how amazing it was.  It was so amazing, in fact, that I wanted to watch it over again.  Immediately, that very night.  I can’t remember the last film I felt that way about; in fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever had that strong a desire to immediately rewatch a film for the sheer joy of it.  The very next day I went out to the library again and borrowed Blue and White, and then watched the entire trilogy “in order.” 

These films were the first of Kieslowski I have ever seen, and I am beyond intrigued now.  His powerful sense of humanity, of interconnectedness, and of cautious optimism for the human race give these three films a soul I have rarely come across in cinema before.  I have not felt this enthusiastic over a new film or films in a very long time.  These are something special.  I cannot wait to see more of his films.

Arbitrary Ratings and final thoughts:

Blue: 10/10 – Binoche is mind-blowing in the best role I’ve yet seen her in.

White: 8/10 – My least favorite of the three, but comically poignant nonetheless and much stronger when its political parallels are considered.

Red: Can I give this an 11?  Wait, it’s my review, so I can?  Awesome.  11/10.  Beyond perfect.  Raises tantalizing questions about fate and destiny all the while being incredibly romantic.  I love it.  My new favorite film, and I don’t say that lightly.

Chungking Express

Chungking Express

1994

Director: Wong Kar-Wai

Starring: Tony Leung, Faye Wong, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Brigitte Lin

Both written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai, Chungking Express takes the viewer on trip through the dank physical and emotional underbelly of 1990s Hong Kong, a city on the precipice of change, as the 1997 handover from the British to the Chinese looms in the background.  We follow several young people through their lives as they intersect at various points and in different ways with one another.

The narrative tells two distinct stories separately.  First up is that of plain clothes cop Qiwu, badge #223 (Kaneshiro).  His girlfriend May, perpetually offscreen, has just dumped him and he’s having a hard time coping.  He hangs out at street food joint “The Midnight Express” and calls May’s family, checks his voicemail, and considers asking out other women.  He buys cans of pineapple with the expiration date May 1^st, 1994.  When he realizes May is not coming back, he turns his affections to blonde-wigged drug smuggler (Lin), just as she is reaching a crisis point in her career.  At this point, we abruptly switch stories to a different cop, this one badge #663 (played excellently by Leung).  He has also been recently jilted by his stewardess girlfriend, and hangs out at the same Midnight Express, where he meets quirky Faye (Wong) who works behind the counter.  She falls in love with him, but he is too sad to notice.  While he is working, she breaks into his apartment and cleans it up for him, gives him new goldfish, replaces his sardines with a different brand, and replaces his soap.  As 663 gradually realizes what is going on, Faye starts to spook about the idea of a relationship with him.

Our first story.

  

Our second story.

The two stories, while they share several elements, have very different tones.  In the first, there is a distinct sense of danger and gangster underworld activities, all channeled through our blonde-wigged smuggler.  She is not a woman to be trifled with; she actively reminded me of Phyllis Dietrichson.  Meanwhile, she is counterpointed with 223, a man so immature he is clearly still a boy; in fact, he turns 25 in his tale.  He is childish in his pursuit of his ex-girlfriend, childish in his buying of May 1^st pineapples, childish in his eating of platefuls of fries with ketchup, and childish in his decision to fall in love with the next woman he sees.  The fact that Wong brings these two together is interesting and unexpected, as they both manage to give one another what is needed despite their disparate temperaments.  She helps welcome him into adulthood in the chastest possible way, and he steels her nerve to do what her job requires.  We have the odd dichotomy of cold, cruel gangsters with wide-eyed, naïve adolescence. 

The second story deals with neither.  Although we still have a cop known only by his badge number, we now have a full blown love story of two people scared to fall in love.  This is sweet and endearing, whereas the first story was gritty and dank.  663 is too wrapped up in his own sorrow to realize Faye likes him, but that’s probably a good thing for her, as she wouldn’t know what to do if he really liked her back.  Flighty and quirky, Faye Wong is phenomenal in her role here; I was shocked to discover she was originally a singer, and this was one of her first large acting roles.  She is a perfect counterpoint to Leung’s swoon-worthy introverted intensity; I found myself wishing more and more, harder and harder that these two souls could find a way to be together.  As off-kilter as their courtship is, it is nonetheless winning and winsome.  

  

Overall, despite the romance in both sections of the film, Wong seems to comment far more on the nature of urban youth rather than simply their love stories.  Throughout the film, we are met with characters that do not have names.  Our two cops are known primarily as their badge numbers – and that’s all.  The blonde-wigged smuggler does not have a name at all, and I only know that Faye is the name of the girl behind the counter in the second story because IMDB told me so.  There is a profound sense of identity lost with these characters.  They live their lives constantly surrounded by others in their urban jungle of Hong Kong, but they fail to connect in meaningful ways.  The world whizzes past them every day, but they are too narcissistic or immature or disillusioned to either notice or care.  Both tales end in ambiguous fashion, doubtful of whether or not the souls they feature actually managed to enact long-lasting change, uncertain of whether they will find the respite they so desperately crave with others.  There is optimism laced into the endings, but Wong refuses to spell everything out for us, leaving it up to the imagination of the viewer.  

  

Along with the tale of urban disillusionment, there is tremendous style in Chungking Express.  Wong plays fully and freely with all kinds of camerawork, including slow-motion, stop cuts, canted angles, handheld jittery shots, and the fascinating combination of slow-motion with sped-up shots.  This helps imbue the movie with a sense of frenetic modernity and disjointed connections.  Wong lights the film with mostly reds, yellows, greens, and blues, occasionally making everything on screen appear slightly sickly.  It’s the same bright color work I remember from his In the Mood for Love.

I suppose I would call Chungking Express a “romantic comedy drama.”  There are elements that are quirky and funny, plenty of elements that are very sweet, but the whole film is tinged with a sense of sadness and anxiety.  It’s a diverting film, telling its tale with a heaping helping of style, and you’ll be left humming that obnoxious Cranberries tune for the next four hours.

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10.

Crumb

Crumb

1994

Director: Terry Zwigoff

Starring: Robert Crumb

An odd documentary by an odd filmmaker about an odd artist.  If you don’t expect Crumb to be a little bit off-kilter, you’re not paying attention.

Crumb is Zwigoff’s examination of underground cult comic artist Robert Crumb.  Following Crumb around immediately prior to his retirement in the south of France, the movie explores several aspects of Crumb’s life, focusing mostly on his family and his upbringing, but also discussing his sexual appetite, the rise of his work, critical reaction to his work, and his past and present relationships.

One of the first things we learn of Robert Crumb comes from his wife Aline.  She tells the camera that Crumb is shy, very shy, and tends to clam up around people he doesn’t know.  If he feels more comfortable with someone, however, he will talk more.  Given this fact, I wonder at Terry Zwigoff’s relationship with Robert Crumb; when Crumb is on camera, he does not flinch at talking about his past and discussing humiliating personal anecdotes.  Granted, many of these are tales or obsessions that he had illustrated in his works, but he talks about them freely as well.  To have someone described as “uncommunicative” prattle on about stories from his childhood – I wonder.  Crumb seems to eschew mainstream culture entirely, refusing associations with famous bands and invitations from Saturday Night Live, and flat out turning down the possibility of creating animated films from his comics.  For him to agree to a documentary about his life, I can only imagine he must have felt that Terry Zwigoff, the director, was a kindred spirit.  I cannot see him agreeing to be filmed, agreeing to talk at such lengths about his personal history in such a public art form, without some sense of spiritual connectedness.  Indeed, Zwigoff himself is hardly mainstream Hollywood, having only five directorial credits to his name.  According to Wikipedia (so take it with a grain of salt), Crumb did not initially want to make the film, but Zwigoff must have worn him down somehow. 

 

The biggest focus of the film is undoubtedly on Crumb and his relationship with his family.  We meet his two brother, Charles and Maxon (his sisters declined to be interviewed for the film), and his mother.  Given what an oddball character Robert Crumb is, it’s surprising to slowly discover over the course of the film that he is easily the most well-adjusted person to emerge from his family.  His brother Charles is a total recluse, living in his mother’s house and so shut up that he hangs blankets over every square inch of outside light.  Taking a constant stream of tranquilizers, he talks about his suicidal and homicidal tendencies.  His mother is hardly any better, yelling at Charles to put the blanket up in just the right way.  Robert’s brother Maxon lives in a transient hotel in San Francisco and spends his days meditating on a bed of nails or sitting in the streets.  Zwigoff doesn’t jump into these revelations, but wisely holds them back.  We meet Charles Crumb early in the film, but at first he only seems a bit quirky.  Much later, when he talks with a shocking honesty about wanting to kill his brother then kill himself, you start to realize just how deeply troubled he is, and it is much the same way with Maxon.  When Zwigoff has made perfectly clear just how maladjusted Crumb’s family is, the intercutting with Robert’s wife Aline making a pasta dinner for Robert and their daughter is a picture of strange normality for a man so often seen as unconventional.  How sad is it, truly, that Robert is easily the most well adjusted member of the family shown in this film.

After Robert’s family, the next largest focus of Crumb is Crumb’s work.  Zwigoff spends a great deal of time interviewing people about Crumb’s art and showing Crumb’s art.  My response to this film is deeply linked with what I think of Crumb’s art.  Prior to watching Crumb, my knowledge of Robert Crumb was this: he was an underground comic artist.  Full stop.  I had never seen anything of his before.  My reaction to his work is well-summarized by some of the women interviewed in this film: intriguing but also disturbing.  If that’s what Crumb wanted, then goal accomplished.  I find his portrayal of women both positive and negative.  Positive, because Crumb is clearly fetishistic about strong, Amazonian women, women who buck the trend of what is considered “beautiful” in Western civilization.  I like his celebration of thick, strapping women.  That’s empowering.  But when Crumb indulges in his sexual fantasies in his work, we see the total sexual subservience of these women in extraordinarily demeaning situations, and I am disgusted and disturbed.  Crumb argues that it is just his own id coming out on the page, but I am prone to agree with one of the women in the film who says, essentially, that the fact of this being a representation of id doesn’t necessarily make it okay to broadcast and publish, as there are people who will undoubtedly use it as an excuse to act irresponsibly.  Is it contributing to a society that has yet to accept women fully as equals to men?  Is this this start of a much deeper conversation without any easy answers?  Yes, absolutely.  So I’m torn about Crumb.  His work is interesting, it’s unique, and it’s a fascinating juxtaposition of style with story(early 1930s animation style telling shocking and unexpected stories), but many times, it goes too far for my taste and I am distinctly turned off.  Go ahead, call me a fuddy-duddy, I don’t care.

Early on in the movie, an art critic speaking about Crumb called him the Breugel of the second half of the twentieth century, and at the end of the film, I found that a very apt comparison.  The raw passion in his work, presented along with horror, is certainly akin to Breugel.  Crumb as a film brings this sort of raw extreme to life.  Robert Crumb is an interesting character and an interesting artist, and I don’t mind having spent some time getting to know him and his family.  He’s not my style, however, and I do not feel compelled go out to find his comics, or, for that matter, watch this film again. 

Arbitrary Rating: 6/10.