Three Colors is a trilogy of films, each named after a stripe on the French flag. I’ve had Three Colors: Red listed as my second-favorite film for the entire time this site has been up—over a quarter of a century now. But the last time I saw it was in the summer of 2004. How will it hold up over twenty years later? That year I also watched Blue and White and gave them pantheon-level scores. Were they deserving, or was it acclaim by association? Let’s find out!
By the way—though I watched these in the proper order (Blue, White, Red), once I started this article I realized that it would flow better if I talked about Red first. As it happens, this matches the way I first saw these films back in the ’90s: I saw Red in a theater having not seen the other two, then rented Blue and White on VHS. I didn’t have my laserdisc player yet!
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| Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agniezka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Edward Klosinski, and Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994 | |
This is a Pattern 44 movie: it’s about a young woman named Valentine, and I love it because I love her. I guess some would say that Red isn’t actually about Valentine, in that she’s not the character who changes—she stays the same because she’s fine as she is. Here’s a very lightly edited recap of how I summarized the central dynamic in the film twenty years ago:
One evening Valentine is driving home when the radio goes screwy. Distracted, she hits something. She stops her car, gets out, and finds that she’s hit a dog—a big German shepherd, still alive. With difficulty, she loads the dog into her back seat and rushes to the address she finds on the dog’s collar to ask what to do. At that address she finds an unlocked house, and inside is a mean old man who tells her that he doesn’t care and to go away. Valentine, distraught, finds a vet who patches up the dog. A few days later, she receives an envelope full of money to reimburse her for the vet bill. Way too much money. She returns to the old man’s house to give back the excess amount.
The old man turns out to be a retired judge who spends his time hunched over a piece of surveillance equipment listening in on his neighbors’ phone calls. Now that he’s no longer behind the bench, he can finally get all the facts of everybody’s case, and they’re all guilty. The heroin dealer, the mother who fakes a heart attack, the faithless lovers… humanity is a waste. Valentine is appalled, not just at the judge’s spying but at his attitude towards his fellow man. “People are good,” she insists. The old man finds this laughable, and turns from a judge to a prosecutor. He makes the case that beneath her do-gooder exterior, Valentine is as base and selfish as the rest.
He loses.
He loses because Valentine is not naive; she’s just awesome. She actually has quite a lot of shit to deal with. She’s a devoted girlfriend—she sleeps with her lover’s jacket while he is traveling abroad and fends off passes from photographers—but every phone call with him devolves into defending herself from baseless, paranoid accusations that Valentine (Valentine!) is cheating on him. She’s a loving sister to a sullen teenage brother with a heroin addiction. She lives in the same crappy world as everyone else and yet her goodness is not the self-serving shell the judge would make of it. She is good, truly good, all the way through.
And that changes everything. This is not a matter of a crusty old git being won over by a young gal with a heart of gold; it’s a philosophical issue. If there is a good person in the world, then it is not the world the judge thought he was living in, and that means a new set of rules. Ethics matter, the welfare of living creatures matters, it is worth venturing out of the house. It is worth continuing to breathe. There are other elements to the film, lots of stuff about fate and coincidence and interconnectedness, but as far as I’m concerned, this is the important one. A world with Valentine in it is worth living in.
This time around, though, I can’t so blithely dismiss the “stuff about fate and coincidence and interconnectedness”. In 2004 I wrote that Valentine “is good. Not good like the heroine of a story; this is a story, of course, but it’s not set in the World of Stories. Valentine is earnest, loving, loyal, innocent, good—and real.” Except, uh, Red is totally set in the World of Stories! The fundamental mechanic of the plot is that while the retired judge became bitter in large part because his heart was broken by a cheating lover and he never met a Valentine until he was in his sixties, when at most she could be a surrogate daughter rather than a life partner, we also follow a young law student whose life is unfolding in pretty much exactly the same way as the judge’s had forty years earlier, right down to the fountain pen he receives upon qualifying to become a judge. The idea is that he is a sort of reincarnation of the retired judge while the old man is still alive—one who can meet Valentine at the right stage of life and live happily ever after with her. I’m sure that for many of the film’s admirers, all these resonances made Red that much more enjoyable, but on this viewing I had to acknowledge that seeing the authorial hand arranging everything so carefully undermined the sense of reality that had once made Valentine so compelling to me. She’s still one of my favorite fictional characters, but that’s the thing—the plotting essentially put a blinking neon sign reading “FICTIONAL CHARACTER” over her head. Rescore: 22 ➞ 19
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| Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agniezka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Slawomir Idziak, and Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993 | |
When I said that each film in this series is named after a stripe on the French flag, I probably should have mentioned that the color of each stripe is supposed to stand for one of the values in the French national motto. Red is for brotherhood—hence Red’s emphasis on connection and separation. Blue is for freedom, but there’s some overlap here, because the freedom the protagonist of Blue finds thrust upon her is freedom from connections and attachments. Her name is Julie, and she is the sole survivor of a one-car wreck. Unable to bring herself to swallow the fistful of Rohypnol tablets she shoves into her mouth upon waking up in the hospital and hearing that her husband and daughter are dead, Julie attempts to bring her old life to a close—arranging final meetings with her acquaintances, selling her possessions, changing her name, moving to the other side of Paris—and start a new one free of any personal entanglements. But before long she does connect with people in her new life and reconnect with people in her old one.
When I wrote about this in 2004, I mainly just mused about how Julie embarks upon the course that Buddhism considers optimal—living free of attachments, as it is clinging to what will inevitably be lost that causes the suffering that defines existence—yet the film considers it pathological. And not just this film: two of my six years as a screenwriter were spent on a project whose central mechanic, set by the senior writer, was an isolated protagonist learning the value of connecting with others. This time around I was mainly struck by the way that Julie, like Valentine, is defined as fundamentally good. She’s generous and reliable. Yet in many ways the contrast is as stark as that between the colors with which the two women are associated. Valentine is warm-hearted and innocent; Julie is jaded and cold. That’s kind of interesting, though it makes Julie’s film rather chilly as well. Rescore: 16 ➞ 9
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| Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agniezka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, Edward Klosinski, and Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994 | |
And this movie is just plain bad. I mean, it’s made well enough, I suppose. Blue is sometimes a bit listless, as Julie doesn’t want anything except to swim at the pool and then have ice cream at the café, so the plot is a matter of things sort of randomly happening to her. In Red, on the other hand, the plotting makes the hand of the author a bit too visible. White strikes a better balance than either—but in the service of a story that is kind of gross.
As noted, Valentine is both good and warm, while Julie is also good but somewhat cold. Dominique, the main female character in White, is evil. But she’s not the protagonist—that’s Karol, the husband Dominique divorces at the very start of the film. He’s a Polish hairdresser who met Dominique while plying his trade; their marriage seems to have been somewhat impulsive, a response to the difficulty of making an international relationship work. But while the two of them had an active sex life before the wedding, afterward Karol finds himself impotent. The suggestion is that Karol would have preferred to settle down in Poland, and having meekly followed Dominique back to her native France makes him feel like less of a man. Dominique disagrees with the way he is failing to pleasure her and not only divorces him, but freezes his access to their bank account. Unable to afford a hotel, he sleeps in the hair salon they share, but when Dominique discovers him, she sets the place on fire, framing him for arson. Penniless and wanted by the police, Karol is reduced to sleeping in a metro station, begging for spare change. With one of the coins he is tossed he calls Dominique; she says that she’s glad he called, because she is currently getting fucked by her new lover and wants him to listen. A heartbroken Karol hangs up on her crescendo of moans.
But in the metro station he meets a fellow Polish expatriate who agrees to smuggle him back to Warsaw. Once on familiar turf, Karol quickly makes a fortune in his newly capitalist homeland and soon is walking around in a big mobster suit with his hair slicked back, rattling off orders to his loyal underlings. Then, with the help of his brother and his friend from the Paris metro, Karol launches his revenge scheme: he draws up a will leaving his entire estate to Dominique and fakes his own death, wagering that the enormous bequest will lure her to Poland. And so it does. He spies on her at his funeral, please to see that she seems to be genuinely mourning him. He then surprises her in her hotel room and, now a confident alpha male, successfully fucks her—but then in the morning she wakes to find him gone, and the police are at the door, here to arrest her for murdering Karol for his money. White on the French flag stands for equality, and the idea is that they are now even. Except apparently Kieslowski thought that ending was too harsh, so he tacked on a coda in which Karol visits Dominique in prison, and having learned her place, an appropriately submissive Dominique indicates that she wants to remarry him. And, yo—that’s a fuckin’ incel plot, bracie. It’s about a bluepilled beta from the feminized West who goes to Eastern Europe, moneymaxxes himself into a Chad, shows Stacy what she gets for her sexuality, and winds up with a hot tradwife. What the fuck in my opinion. Rescore: 16 ➞ 3
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