Trois couleurs: Rouge, Trzy kolory: Czerwony
Krzysztof Kieślowski (1994)
Three Colours: Red is the most complicated and compelling part of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s trilogy. Like Blue and White, it’s co-written by Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz (and scored by Zbigniew Preisner though the music is less imposing in Red than in the first two films). Expanses or hints of the title colour are variously in evidence: on a billboard advertisement, as background to the face of the film’s commercial-model heroine, Valentine Dussaut; in décor and clothes; as a trio of cherries on a fruit machine; as blood on Valentine’s hand when she tends an injured animal. According to the trilogy’s tricolour scheme, the corresponding French Revolutionary watchword here is fraternité and Kieślowski explores interesting aspects of the concept. Red’s other principal character is Joseph Kern, a retired judge, whose former line of work illustrates in a particularly explicit way how the actions of one person affect the lives of others. In retirement Kern lives alone. The closest he gets to brotherhood is eavesdropping on his neighbours’ telephone conversations.
Modelling is a part-time job for Valentine (Irène Jacob), who’s also a university student in Geneva, where Red takes place. Her boyfriend, Michel, is currently working in London; whenever they speak on the phone, he demands assurances that Valentine is alone. She makes the acquaintance of Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant) after knocking down his dog while driving back from a photo shoot. Rita, a German Shepherd, is unaccompanied at the time but has an address printed on her collar. When Valentine tracks him down, Kern confirms he is Rita’s owner and that she ran away the previous day; he shows no interest in having the dog back and Valentine, after seeing to her veterinary care, continues to look after Rita until a subsequent visit to Kern’s house. It’s on that visit that Valentine catches Kern listening in on a phone conversation between a male neighbour and the latter’s (male) lover. Valentine takes Kern to task; he dares her to report him to the neighbour. (In trying to do so, she discovers the neighbour’s daughter is also earwigging, on a phone extension.) Soon afterwards, Kern volunteers a written public confession to his spying activities. His statement results in a class-action lawsuit.
The possessive Michel is unseen throughout but another young man, Auguste Bruner (Jean-Pierre Lorit), is the third important character in the story. He has few actual interactions with the two protagonists but there are plenty of connections between him and them. Auguste lives in the same street as Valentine. He’s studying – preparing for exams to qualify as a judge. He’s a dog owner. He’s jealous of his girlfriend, Karin (Frédérique Feder). Her unusual occupation is providing, as a phone service, ‘personalised weather forecasts’; although he doesn’t set foot outside his house until required to appear in court, Kern regularly calls Karin’s number. The ex-judge suspects another neighbour of drug trafficking; on his way home one night, Auguste drops a textbook which falls open at a chapter on drug trafficking; when he passes his judge exams, Auguste credits his success to this lucky chance. Unlike Valentine, Karin is unfaithful to her boyfriend. The spying lawsuit is the first case over which newly-qualified Auguste presides; Karin is there for the occasion but Kern notices her flirting with another man. In time, Auguste grows so desperately suspicious that he scales the outside of Karin’s apartment block to see what she’s up to. He discovers her having sex with someone else.
Although the billboard ad featuring Valentine’s face is for chewing gum, the photographer on the shoot (Samuel Le Bihan) suggests that her hair should be wet and her expression sad. In the climax to the story, his advice comes to seem prescient – in marked contrast to Karin’s weather forecasts. Planning to join Michel in England, Valentine is nervous of flying. Kern, with whom she has developed a persisting, tentative friendship, suggests that she take the ferry instead, Karin having assured him that the weather on the Channel is set fair for the week ahead. Karin tells Kern she’ll also be sailing in the area then, on a yacht, presumably with her new boyfriend. We watch Auguste and, moments later, Valentine arriving on the ferry; each asks directions to their seat. We next see Kern, grim-faced, watching a television news report: in stormy weather, the ferry has sunk and very many passengers are missing – ditto ‘two people aboard a yacht’.
By this stage of Red, Kern’s relationship to the other principals is confounding. Auguste can’t actually be Kern’s younger self but he’s a kind of alter ego. When Valentine asks Kern if he has ever loved, he tells her just once, as a young man. The love affair turned sour when he witnessed his sweetheart having sex with a man called Hugo Holbling; Kern nevertheless followed the girl to England, where she died in an accident. (Years later, Kern was asked to try the case of the same Hugo Holbling, who was found guilty. It was after this that Kern took early retirement.) As for Valentine, Kern tells her he’s dreamed of her as a fifty-year-old, living happily with the man she loves. Explaining that he himself never loved again because ‘I stopped believing’, Kern muses to Valentine, ‘Maybe I never met the woman … maybe you’re the woman I never met’.
Even though it’s soon clear that Red isn’t interested in realistic probability, it takes time to adjust to this regarding Rita. When Valentine has carried the bleeding, whimpering dog from the road into her car, the priority is obviously to get her to a vet. Instead, Valentine, after looking at Rita’s collar, consults a street map, drives to Kern’s house, leaves the dog in the car, rings a doorbell, gets no answer, wanders about a bit, sees Kern sitting inside, enters a door that happens to be open, and has a conversation with him. After all that, she drives to a vet, apparently unconcerned by the passage of time since the accident. She’s right to be unconcerned, though. The vet sees to the dog’s wounds before announcing that Rita is pregnant. From this point on, that’s the medical condition that matters (Rita’s injury disappears instantly). I was exasperated again when Valentine took the dog for a walk and let her off the lead with the words, ‘But don’t run away’: guess what happens next. After a brief detour into a church service, Rita heads back to Kern’s, which is where she then stays. She has her pups, one of which Kern will give to Valentine when she returns from England … Rita fares better eventually than Auguste’s dog. Returning to his apartment after catching Karin in flagrante delicto, Auguste punches the animal when it gets on his bed to snuggle up. Later, he ties it to a lamppost and walks away but they’re back together when he boards the ferry. By the end of Red, it was the symbolic import of what happens with the dogs that I couldn’t get my head round.
As I came out of Red at BFI, another member of the audience – a pleasant, puzzled man, probably about my age (sixty-seven) – asked me if I’d understood it all. That was easy to answer: no. (I couldn’t fathom at all the significance of a subplot involving Marc (Leo Ramseyer), Valentine’s brother who turns out to be her half-brother.) The man seemed keen to know what I thought I did understand, though, about the strange connections between the main characters. I muttered a few inarticulate words in an effort to oblige but didn’t get on to different connections that had struck me a few times as I watched Red and have stuck with me since – the connections between Kern and Kieślowski and God. Kern seems sure that his dreams give him foreknowledge of Valentine’s future life. Despite consulting a weather forecaster, he’s filled with foreboding when, just before Valentine leaves for England, a violent storm causes flooding in the building where she has just appeared in a fashion show, attended by Kern. He doesn’t, however, see fit to warn Valentine off the impending sea voyage: it’s as if he understands that her fate is predetermined. For his part, Kieślowski seems at pains to stress that, within the universe of their films, directors are omnipotent and capricious. In the closing scene of Red, Kern watches another TV news report about the ferry disaster. The reporter’s voice confirms that, of the several hundred passengers on board, only seven have survived, unharmed; there’s footage of them arriving back on dry land. They are Julie, then Olivier, from Three Colours: Blue; Karol, then Dominique, from Three Colours: White; last but not least, Valentine and Auguste (minus dog), who are now shown together. (The only escapee we don’t see is an English barman on the ship.) Kern watches the television screen with relief and approval.
Kieślowski’s deliverance of these individuals is touching (albeit Dominique is an undeserving survivor) for two reasons. First, it somehow expresses how a film-maker, especially a writer-director, brings to life on screen people who otherwise would not exist. Second, it’s hard in retrospect not to contrast this select band’s good fortune with the fate in reality of several of those involved in the making of Three Colours. A few months after Red’s Cannes premiere, Benoît Régent, who was Olivier in Blue, died suddenly, aged forty-one. A decade later, Philippe Volter, who in the same film played the Paris estate agent through whom Julie rents a flat, committed suicide, in his mid-forties. In March 1996, Krzysztof Kieślowski himself died, during open-heart surgery following a heart attack, at the age of fifty-four. He had announced his retirement from film-making at the premiere of Red but his Wikipedia entry indicates that he was soon having second thoughts. Just before his untimely death, Kieślowski had been working with Krzysztof Piesiewicz on scripts for a Dante-inspired Hell-Purgatory-Heaven trilogy.
The two leads are a big reason why Red stands out as the high point of Three Colours. Irène Jacob, who first came to prominence as the title character in Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique (1991), is doubly appealing here. Valentine’s beauty is undeniable but unaffected; we can believe she earns money as a model but Jacob gives her a subtle innocence and makes Valentine very likeable (except when it comes to canine care). The great Jean-Louis Trintignant complements Jacob marvellously. He gradually develops Kern from a desiccated, reptilian figure into something richer and mysterious. While the cameo reappearances of the lead actors in Blue and White are of course the most striking reference to these earlier films, I was even more pleased to see Kieślowski deal with what he must have regarded as unfinished business from Blue. He reintroduces a bent-double old woman, who struggles to reach up to put a bottle into a bottle bank. In Blue, in Paris, Juliette Binoche’s Julie watched this struggle from a distance. In Red, in Geneva, the bottle teeters on the edge, as it did before, but Valentine lends a helping hand to get it safely inside.
30 May 2023
