Kieslowski's "Three Colors"

Just when it seemed that European cinema had become fossilized, the great Polish director created the slickest -- and loveliest -- concept album in art-film history.

By Jonathan Kiefer

Jun 10, 2002 | In 1995, the Los Angeles Times asked Krzysztof Kieslowski how movies should participate in culture, and this was his reply: "Film is often just business -- I understand that and it's not something I concern myself with. But if film aspires to be part of culture, it should do the things great literature, music and art do: elevate the spirit, help us understand ourselves and the world around us and give people the feeling they are not alone."

Now those are words to make movies by, and Kieslowski certainly did. Nearing the end of the millennium, when even the best works of those other European giants, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, had started to seem fossilized, Kieslowski, their contemporary, found his stride. The great Polish filmmaker, who was raised in an economically impotent, foreign-dominated runt country and came of creative age in a climate of political censorship, had finally accumulated the resources he so clearly deserved: a literate and deep-feeling world audience, complete artistic freedom and plenty of Western money to fund his work.

He invested wisely. Kieslowski's "Three Colors" trilogy was more than just the slickest concept album in the history of European cinema. It was a quantum leap for the medium, a reminder not only of what was possible, but what was necessary. As "Blue," "White" and "Red" hit theaters, one at a time, moviegoers everywhere began feeling giddy. They knew something very special, and vital, was afoot. For those who'd seen Kieslowski's "Decalogue" (a serialized tone poem on the Ten Commandments, and also an astonishing masterpiece), the prospect of another segmented, philosophical parable was all too tantalizing. For those who hadn't, "Three Colors" was like nothing they'd ever experienced. Film didn't seem like such a youngster among the arts anymore.

The richly textured trilogy capped Kieslowski's extraordinary career, taking on the deepest and most complex moral subjects with grace and panache, but always at ground level. Ostensibly it was derived from the French Revolution themes of liberty, equality and fraternity, and their corresponding colors in the French flag. But the films are deeply personal and in many ways Polish; they restore those lofty concepts, without diminishing them, to humble human proportions.

In temperament they differ significantly but are thematically unified by Kieslowski's inquisitive, haunted and wryly humane sensibility. His genius is evident not only in the fluency with such varied tones -- the inward, meditative drama of "Blue," the oblique social comedy of "White" and the nimble, all-knowing mystery-romance of "Red" -- but the elegant orchestration by which he unites them. Each involves an enormous narrative arc: The characters endure debilitating betrayals and literal or figurative deaths, then respond to the prospect of renewal so generously provided for them by the director. Yet each is lean and swift, clocking in at around an hour and a half. Not bad for so intense a sensual, emotional and spiritual workout.

In "Blue," Julie (Juliette Binoche) is rather brutally "liberated" by the death of her daughter and husband, a famous composer, in a car accident. To defeat grief, she discards her former life. "I don't want any belongings, any memories," she says. "No friends, no love. Those are all traps." But her husband's music, which, Kieslowski suggests, was really created by her in the first place, is irrepressible. As is true throughout the trilogy, Zbigniew Preisner's score, here a funereal concerto gradually realized through Julie's reclaimed inspiration, reinforces the tone and theme of the work from within. It's a functional part of the narrative. What's more, even in such a visually sumptuous work, Kieslowski is brave enough to tell us -- through blackouts, blurred focus and commanding stillness -- not to look, but simply to listen.

Binoche has done plenty of good work, but this remains her best, and I'm not just saying that because I think the Academy blew its chance, with "Blue," to start an award for best haircut. Julie is almost impossibly chic, partly for being viewed through the director's Eastern European eye, and partly, rightly, for the exquisite care with which Binoche measures her performance; she taps right into a cool, beguiling, divine feminine energy rarely seen on-screen, and slowly pours it into Julie's life.

"White," a playful riposte to the earnestness of "Blue," is a sort of ironic Polish Horatio Alger story, well stocked with lumpen misfits and great Slavic faces. Here, "equality" is a matter of comeuppance. Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is an oafish and adorable Polish hairdresser whose porcelain-skinned Parisian wife (Julie Delpy) divorces him for failing to consummate their marriage. The mere fact of being in France renders Karol impotent. He loses everything, but meets a fellow Pole who agrees to smuggle him back to Warsaw. There, Karol shrewdly bullshits his way through his country's newly opened markets, amasses a dubious fortune, wills it to his wife, fakes his own death and frames her for his murder.

Kieslowski, who so keenly satirized the crippling excesses of communism in his earlier work, unflinchingly has a go at training-wheels capitalism, but not without affection for the thawing tundra of his beleaguered mother country. Having been stuffed in a suitcase, flown in cargo from France to Poland, stolen by bandits, robbed and beaten up, Karol finally looks out across the speckled white vista of a frozen landfill, and says, "Home at last!" Shortly thereafter Preisner's tongue-in-cheek tango begins, which will carry Karol through the dance of his revenge and into equality.

The fraternity in "Red" also begins ironically, through a tangled knot of missed or blocked connections. A young model, appropriately named Valentine (Irène Jacob), patiently endures the remote jealousy of a geographically and emotionally unavailable boyfriend, while coming close to crossing paths with another young man who lives right on her block. By chance -- or not -- Valentine runs over a German shepherd and must track down its owner, a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who lives alone and eavesdrops on his neighbors' phone calls.

The judge has not recovered from a long-ago romantic betrayal, ostensibly because fate never allowed him to meet the right woman, namely Valentine. Their lives enlace, and we learn with the usual help from Preisner -- this time in a swirling bolero, which modulates into a minor key to raise the neck hairs just as certain scenes take on a supernatural charge -- that the young man on Valentine's block is precisely reprising the judge's early life.

Next Page: "Red" is Kieslowski's version of "The Tempest" -- a self-aware summation of a life's work

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