Kieslowski's THREE COLORS Trilogy
A film review by Gareth Rees
Copyright 1994 Gareth Rees
The three films are called BLUE, WHITE and RED; the colours are those on the French revolutionary flag, the Tricolor, and the films are nominally about the three ideals of the French revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity (respectively). They are set in three European cities: Paris, Warsaw and Geneva (respectively).
They are not otherwise connected in terms of character or plot, except for a marvelously coincidental sequence in which the main characters from the three films all appear together at the end of RED.
There are occasional references to each other and to others of Kieslowski's films, for example the old woman trying to put a bottle in a bottle bank who appears in WHITE and RED illustrates some of the differences between the situations and characters of Karol and Valentine; Juliette Binoche (the star of BLUE) appears very briefly in the courtroom at the start of WHITE; the funeral music in BLUE attributed to the fictitious 18th-century Dutch composer "van den Budenmayer' (actually Zbigniew Preisner) is the same as that in NO END, Kieslowski's first collaboration with Preisner. Van den Budenmayer turns up again in RED, when Valentine buys a CD of his music. There are other references; Kieslowski is keen on this short of intertextuality.
As Kieslowski admits in interviews, the revolutionary themes are just an excuse, a thematic structuring on which to hang the films, which are about people, not about abstract themes. The pan-European settings (and the pro-European unity of the "Song for the Unification of Europe" which features in BLUE) are to some extent a ruse to get pan-European funding.
The themes are treated very ironically: BLUE is about the unwanted and unwelcome liberty experienced by Julie when her husband and child are killed in a car crash; WHITE is about Karol's attempt to get even with the glamorous wife who has divorced him, and RED is about a retired judge who, cynical about the possibility of justice, uses a radio to spy on the telephone conversations of his neighbours.
Kieslowski has said that he does not intend to make any more films after RED; he attributes this to the difficulty of getting funding. If he does retire, it would be a great shame, as he is surely one of Europe's most talented directors.
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