CINEMANIA Presents all three parts of Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s THREE COLORS trilogy, RED, WHITE, and BLUE, which represent the three colors of the French flag and the French national motto. The films also represent the great Kieslowski’s last as a director and do not disappoint, forming a trilogy will stand forever as one of cinema?s most profound achievements. See individual titles for details below.
SAT OCT 7, 2006: BLUE
SAT NOV 4, 2006: MACARIO*
*(Special Dia de los Muertos Screening)
SAT NOV 11, 2006: WHITE
SAT DEC 2, 2006: RED
“Blue, liberty; White, equality; Red, fraternity… We looked very closely at these three ideas, how they functioned in everyday life, but from an individual’s point of view. These ideals are contradictory with human nature. When you deal with them practically, you do not know how to live with them. Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity?”
Writer/Director Krzysztof Kieslowski
CULTURAL STAGE OF ART | FORO CULTURAL DE LAS ARTES
410-B W. 4th Street, Suite # 4
Santa Ana, CA. 92701 (Lower Level)
Right at the Artists Village across to Ronald Reagan Federal Building
FREE PARKING at 3rd St. & Birch St.
INFO 714.543.0613
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SAT OCT 7th, 2006
Trois couleurs: Bleu
France/Poland/Switzerland, 1993
MPAA Classification: No MPAA Rating (Sexual situations, mature themes, nudity)
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoit Regent, Florence Pernel, Charlotte Very
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
In French with subtitles
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SAT NOV 11, 2006
Trois couleurs: White
France/Switzerland/Poland, 1994
U.S. Release Date: 6/94 (limited)
MPAA Classification: R (Sexual situations, mature themes, violence)
Cast: Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy, Janusz Gajos, Jerzy Stuhr
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
In French and Polish with subtitles
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SAT DEC 2, 2006
Trois couleurs: Red
France/Switzerland/Poland, 1994
MPAA Classification: R (Mature themes, sexual situations, nudity)
Cast: Irene Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Frederique Feder, Jean-Pierre Lorit
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
In French with subtitles
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Some Films are RATED R for explicit and adult content
*Schedule subject to change without notice
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THREE COLORS TRILOGY: BLUE, WHITE, RED (Trois Couleurs: Bleu, Blanc, Rouge)
Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoit R?gent, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy, Ir?ne Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant
Few filmmakers have ended their careers on as high a note as Krzysztof Kieslowski did when he retired in 1994. He died less than two years later, but his late career included the awe-inspiring Decalogue in 1988, and the mystical Double Life of Veronique in 1991, followed by the ambitious Three Colors. Taken together, Blue, White, and Red are a visionary swan song for one of European cinema’s most poetic moralists.
The three films comprise a lyrical, expressive, often beguiling meditation on human frailties and the need for connection. Kieslowski and his longtime screenwriting collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz take the two-centuries old slogans of the French Revolution — libert?, ?galit?, fraternit? — and examine them not as political concepts, as might be expected, but as personal touchstones. The films trace the interior lives of characters burdened by circumstance, alienation, death, and loss. Rather than working towards overarching resolution, each film achieves a small catharsis.
Like Michelangelo Antonioni (but without the fetish for architecture), Kieslowski portrays these lives through images, without explanatory dialogue. This deeply metaphorical language produces a series of unforgettable impressions, none more elegant and powerful than the moment in Blue, when Julie (Juliette Binoche) takes a nighttime swim in a deserted pool, its waters suffused with blue light.
Blue is the color of liberty (white stands for equality, red for fraternity), but it is also the color of sorrow, and here Julie is swimming in grief. At the start of the film, a car accident claims the lives of her husband and daughter. Julie is badly injured, but survives, only to live through the hell of profound personal loss. Her initial response, self-immolation, turns into an aspiration for absolute freedom in the form of isolation. She sells her possessions and her home, destroys her composer husband’s scores, and strives for anonymity. “I want no belongings, no memories, no friends, no love,” she says. “Those are all traps.”
Ineluctably, those traps impinge on Julie’s life: a neighbor asks her for help; her husband’s collaborator, Olivier (Benoit R?gent), loves her; and she comes upon unnerving secrets from her husband’s past. Julie does everything in her power to keep these demands and discoveries at bay, failing to realize that she will find her liberty by confronting her past. Only by opening herself to memories and obligations can she achieve redemption.
As a portrait of grief, Blue eviscerates, but in its cinematic virtuosity, it mesmerizes as well. Filled with reflections in mirrors and windows and first-person perspectives through Julie’s eyes, it also contains one of Kieslowski’s most arresting techniques: a quick dissolve, typically a demarcation of time, to mark Julie’s recollections or thoughts. All of these elements lend beauty to her suffering.
Binoche’s performance surely enhances this beauty. Typically an efficient actress, she turns this almost wordless role into a minimalist portrait of sorrow. The story of Blue is told almost entirely in her face and gestures, and with expressions so appropriately economical that you think she might melt into the background: her quivering chin, a brief flash of pain across her brow, her fist scraping against a wall.
White, a black comedy about a man’s obsession, revenge, and redemption, is less understated than Blue, but it is no less ironic. At the film’s beginning, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is publicly humiliated by his wife Dominique (Julie Delpy), who files for divorce on the grounds of his sexual impotence. Small, unassertive, and physically weak, he’s a put-upon fellow whose matrimonial and vocational woes force him to return to his Polish homeland, smuggled by a newfound friend in, of all things, a suitcase. He resumes his job as a hairdresser in his brother’s salon, but, moonlighting as a security guard, he is able to purchase property and then sell it to its original prospective buyers. Karol’s accumulating wealth is an elaborate plan to exact revenge upon Dominique.
Kieslowski once remarked that the problem with equality is that everyone wants to be more equal. In a capitalist society, like the post-Communist Poland to which Karol returns, being more “equal” is an obsession. The economic opportunities that are open to Karol allow him to reclaim his dignity and potency.
Like Blue, White explores the significance of objects. Karol’s only possessions when he returns to Poland are a porcelain bust and a pocket comb. If the bust’s alabaster hue recalls Dominique’s skin, providing Karol with a constant focus for his revenge, the comb is a reminder that his problem, like Julie’s, is lack of perspective. When he holds the comb to his eyes, the teeth, like bars of a jail cell, signify his imprisonment in a lonely, perverse existence. Karol is incapable of realizing that his happiness lies in human connections, for instance, in fraternity with the wife who has forsaken him.
Connections, in which freedom and equality may be found, are strongest in Red, the most affirmative of the three movies. Such strength is suggested by the color itself, which permeates every frame — in doors, clothes, landmarks, cars, lights, blankets, signs, even dog leashes. This ubiquity only seems to underline — in its arbitrary connectedness — the harrowing isolation of the main characters, who meet through what seems to be pure chance. Valentine (Ir?ne Jacob) is a model with a boyfriend who is never home. When she accidentally runs over a dog, she takes it to its owner, a lonely, retired judge named Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant).
He spends his days listening to his neighbors’ telephone conversations with high-tech equipment. This repulses Valentine, while Joseph is entirely indifferent to her, but they gradually bond. His secret past, in which his deep love for a woman was destroyed by her infidelity, makes him wish he had been born later so that he might have loved Valentine instead. In turn, she is drawn to him by his seemingly authoritative observations about her family, her emotions, and her purpose (his injunction to her is simply, “Be”).
Red is not about grandiloquent lessons, and it doesn’t drive the trilogy towards some inevitable conclusion. It tumbles through one accident after another and finds its meaning about fraternity in colors, images, and objects, and in Valentine herself. Her innocence makes her slightly unaware of her own feelings and the world around her, but it also makes her more likely to find community; she is more generous than her counterparts in the first two films. The most resonant moment in Red consists of a basic gesture, the judge’s outstretched hand placed upon a window as Valentine places hers next to his.
This instance of bonding — of fraternity — is not an answer to the film’s many questions of circumstance, estrangement, and loss. Rather, it’s a last line in a parable about separation (Valentine from her boyfriend, Joseph from his past lover) that conflates past and present, and links disparate people including a young lawyer named Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit) whose importance is unexplained, in an unresolved mystery.
Red, like Blue and White, is neither instructive nor judgmental. They are moral, but not moralistic. All feature a recurring instance, as an old woman (or, in White, an old man) tries to place a glass bottle in a recycling bin. How Julie, Karol, and Valentine react to this situation says much about them, but the films do not judge their reactions. No action or choice is right or wrong, and there are no accidents, despite all the chances encounters. In Three Colors, everything leads to, or away from, human connection.
Trois Couleurs: Bleu, 1993
[Three Colors: Blue]
Blue is a work of such eviscerating intensity that it is almost impossible to describe with words. For this reason, I cannot imagine anyone but Juliette Binoche playing the part of Julie Vignon de Courcy, the lone survivor in a car accident that claimed the lives of her husband, a renowned composer, and their young daughter. This is a devastating film that is not based on contrived dialogue, but on subtle actions. Julie’s grief is so profound that she cannot cry, nor even feel. She seems cold and silent, indifferent to her loss. Yet her body language tells us that she is in pain. The corner of her mouth slightly quivers as she traces her daughter’s casket through a television set. Her body goes limp when she approaches the doorway of her husband’s study. Her gaze turns protective and territorial when a neighbor touches a blue crystal mobile that once hung in her daughter’s room. Unable to live in the country estate with her painful memories, she abandons all of her possessions to start a new life. But physical distance cannot sever her from her past, withdrawing further into her grief, locked in enigmatic silence. Her husband’s business partner, Olivier (Benoit Regent), searches for her, offering a means of paying tribute to her husband’s legacy by collaborating on his unfinished reunification symphony, and attempts to bring closure. Blue is a beautifully realized, intimate, and intensely personal film on the process of healing and catharsis.
The use of blue imagery in the film is, paradoxically, the most elemental and most abstract of the colors in the trilogy. Indeed, blue is the color associated with grief. However, Kieslowski uses suffering as a means to illustrate the theme of cathartic liberation. Julie’s periodic swims in the pool (which appears blue at night), completion of her husband’s unfinished symphony (with a blue pen), and transfer of their country estate to his mistress (who is expecting a boy) are all symbolic acts of closure. Blue stands for libert?, or liberty,in the French flag. There is freedom in having nothing. There is also freedom in losing everything.
Trois Couleurs: Blanc, 1994
[Three Colors: White]
White is a fascinating, dark comedy about obsession, revenge, and redemption, replete with subtle irony. It is also a disturbing portrait of the price exacted when a soul is consumed by its own destructive passions. Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is a broken Polish immigrant whose beautiful French wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy), publicly humiliates him in a French courtroom during their divorce hearing. While panhandling on a Paris subway, he meets a fellow countryman, who would later become his most trusted confidant. They are both melancholy and want to go home. Through a series of fortuitous, albeit sinister events, Karol returns to a corrupted, post-communist Poland. Through illicit means, he sets out to make his fortune, and attempts to reclaim his life and love. White is a highly engaging film about complex human emotions. It is also Kieslowski’s personal statement on the disintegration of his beloved homeland. There are several bittersweet moments when a tormented Karol watches his beloved from a distance. It is as if Karol, like Kieslowski himself, realizes that he can never go home again.
Kieslowski’s achronologic use of flash forwards and flashbacks illustrates the film’s underlying theme – resurrection (note the similar effect achieved in Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru). Karol flashes back to his wedding day, with an image of his bride in a white wedding dress, during the divorce proceeding. There is a glimpse of Dominique in a white room… Is Karol also recounting the episode in his mind? Time is deliberately obscured; events seem cyclical. It is a story that begins with an end, and ends with a beginning.
Trois Couleurs: Rouge, 1994
[Three Colors: Red]
Red is an intricately constructed parable on the need for connection and the complexity of fate. Valentine (Irene Jacob) is a model whose vacuous existence is disrupted when chance intercedes and, one evening after a runway show, runs over a German shepherd. She meets the dog’s owner, Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a reclusive, retired judge. We later see that the seemingly misanthropic judge has been intercepting the telephone conversations of his neighbors, and amplifying them through his stereo. Through a series of peripheral characters and events, we gain insight into the judge’s traumatic past, and a sense of the universality of isolation. It is not accidental that the deepest secrets of the human soul are revealed in moments of absence and separation. But Red is also a love story – a deep intimacy that is cerebral and not corporal. There is an especially poignant scene where the judge, inside the car, places the palm of his hand onto the window, and Valentine, outside, presses her hand against the glass, to match his. It is obvious that they are deeply in love, but are separated by invisible barriers. This is a film of intoxicating beauty and profound revelation that continues to unfold long after the conclusion.
The suffusive use of red throughout the film has an overwhelming intensity reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. Red is the color of love and blood – life and death. Kieslowski uses the color to portray a contemporary liebestod. Valentine is Joseph Kern’s “breath of life”. She is the catalyst that can awaken his hollow soul, heal his callous heart, and, in the midst of tragedy, find closure. The element of chance is a recurrent theme in Kieslowski’s films (note the near encounters in The Double Life of Veronique). Valentine methodically places a coin in a newsstand slot machine every morning. Two lovers decide what to do for the evening by tossing a coin. The judge tells Valentine, “Perhaps you’re the woman I never met.” It is a powerful device in the master’s hands – a means to explore the need for connection – to find Joseph Conrad’s proverbial secret sharer of one’s soul. The idea that chance can cause happiness as easily as it causes pain, unite or divide, bring love or loss, is a profoundly unsettling thought.
CULTURAL STAGE OF ART | FORO CULTURAL DE LAS ARTES
410-B W. 4th Street, Suite # 4
Santa Ana, CA. 92701 (Lower Level)
Right at the Artists Village across to Ronald Reagan Federal Building
FREE PARKING at 3rd St. & Birch St.
INFO 714.543.0613
