Ah yes, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy. Not to date myself too much, but I remember these being big arthouse type films when I was in college. Heck, my college’s TV channel ran them at one point. I never saw more than portions of them, and I do remember White looking very overexposed. Regardless, Kieslowski’s trilogy, very loosely connected, was based around the colors of the French flag and the ideals of the French Revolution. They’ve been on my radar for a while, but I never could quite get around to seeing them in part because I wasn’t sure if it mattered what order I watched them in. I knew each film would find great use for whatever color was in the title, and that was about it, really. The Stacker list only has one of the three, namely Red.
Apparently, it was the last one of the three. I did learn from Wikipedia that the main characters from the previous two films do have some brief cameos, and yeah, having now seen Red, those appearances don’t get much shorter than what happens here where the characters appear on screen for a TV news report and don’t even have any lines. Anyway, I have now seen the final part in the artsiest of cinematic universes.
The film opens with law student/aspiring judge Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit) going about his business in his apartment. His routine seems rather pleasant, and he has a friendly dog. I’m a sucker for dogs, so is he the main character here? Oddly enough, no. While Auguste will appear off-and-on throughout the film, as soon as he leaves his apartment, the camera goes across the street to another apartment inhabited by student/fashion model Valentine (Irène Jacob). She’s likewise getting ready for her day, but her boyfriend calls from overseas, and he comes across as possessive, the jealous type, and setting off a whole bunch of the usual alarm bells when a character like this guy appears, or would if he were ever more than a voice on the phone who seems to be making some harsh demands on Valentine. As it is, Valentine is the film’s main character, and while the film is billed on Wikipedia as a “romantic mystery,” anyone thinking she’s going to meet Auguste and have some fireworks go off is going to be sorely disappointed as the two spend most of the film in close proximity to each other while leading what looks like similar but separate lives. They do seem to encounter each other by the end of the film, but I don’t think they even exchange any words.
That’s actually the main theme of the film, namely the concept of “fraternity,” that people are just connected and maybe all of us are in this thing we call life together. It’s a good theme, one I will get back to, but I want take a moment to say something about Irène Jacob that I don’t think I will ever really get a chance to say anywhere else. She’s a talented actor, easy on the eye and all, but I know her from one film: a 1995 adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staring Laurence Fishburne as Othello and Kenneth Branagh as Iago. Jacob played Desdemona. Now, I’m a Shakespeare guy and an English teacher. I have taught Othello the play many times, and I usually follow it up with at least some scenes from that film. It’s not a bad adaptation, but it’s not a great one either. There are a number of factors going into my opinion of this film. Branagh is someone who I think has a good sense of Shakespeare’s general vibe, and I do enjoy it when he directs an adaptation, but he’s only acting in this one. Both Branagh and Fishburne have moments where, after soliloquizing to the camera, they will pause for a moment to give the audience a look like they know there are people watching them, and that’s just kinda knocks me out of the moment. And then there’s Jacob, saying all of her lines with a fairly thick French accent. Shakespeare’s language and rhythm can be challenging even for native English speakers–see Jack Lemmon in a small role for Branagh’s Hamlet–but one of the things I look for in a Shakespearean film is, well, I wanna listen to and enjoy the Shakespeare. Something like, say, Julie Taymor’s Titus or Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet don’t work for me because there’re so many crazy visuals that it’s distracting from what I want to do most with any Shakespeare adaptation. And I do feel similarly about when otherwise very talented French actors take on Shakespeare in English. Maybe it’s my tinnitus. Maybe it’s their accents. I just have trouble following what they are saying, and Jacob actually takes away a little from Othello as a result.
That said, I will say her casting there does make a lot of sense. She was in her late twenties, and a love scene between her and Fishburne did have a nice visual representation of her very pale skin against his very dark skin. I don’t generally expect scenes like that in any Shakespeare adaptation for good reason, but years ago, a student of mine from a community college course, one who was a little bit older than me and had a live-in boyfriend, was amused to report that she had rented the DVD from her local video store, and her boyfriend walked in on THAT SCENE, and he remarked he had no idea that sort of stuff was in Shakespeare.
OK, that was a long digression. Back to Red.
Red is essentially Valetine’s story, as I said above, but it does offer parallels to Auguste’s. They aren’t quite the same, but they’re similar enough to draw easy comparisons. Both start the film with a partner who turns out to be bad for them. Valentine’s boyfriend is obvious from the beginning while Auguste only learns the hard way late in the film when he catches his girlfriend cheating on him. They live across the street from each other in similar apartments. Both have an affection for dogs–I’m getting to that for Valentine–and both have connections to the legal system, though for Valentine, it’s more about being associated with someone who is rather than her being a lawyer or judge herself. Heck, Valentine’s big modeling moment, a billboard-style advertisement, is mirrored at the end of the film after she is rescued at sea and the TV news pauses the image to inform the home audience who she is. Auguste just happens to be standing next to her when it happens the second time.
So, if Valentine isn’t connected to Auguste, who is she connected to? That would be one Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Valentine meets the reclusive Kern when, while driving home, she hits a dog. The dog is not badly hurt, but she takes the pooch, a German shepherd, to the address on the collar, Kern’s place. Kern is initially grouchy and doesn’t seem to care much for the dog, causing Valentine to take her to the vet herself where the dog’s patched up and revealed to be pregnant. The dog, Rita, does go back to Valentine’s place, but the first chance she gets, runs off back to Kern’s home, and that leads to Kern and Valentine gradually becoming friends. Kern is a retired judge. In his spare time, he eavesdrops on his neighbors’ phone calls. Valentine thinks that’s wrong, and while she won’t personally tell one neighbor about the activity for complicated reasons, she does gradually get the older man to warm up the idea of leaving the house and being her friend. That causes him to confess his crimes and submit himself to a class-action lawsuit to be presided over by a newly installed judge…Auguste.
There’s more to this ongoing idea of parallels. Kern and Auguste parallel in ways similar to Auguste and Valentine, where lost love plays a hand in both the old and young judges’ respective personal lives and careers. Much like with Valentine, though, Kern doesn’t have any significant contact with Auguste. In many ways, it just isn’t that kind of film. Instead, Red is more about how people can be connected while more or less staying strangers. Valentine may help Kern become a better man in his golden years, and he did promise her one of his dog’s puppies, but the bigger idea there seems to be that Valentine is helping Kern change, that he will not longer be the reclusive, antisocial man she met but will instead be a man who will show relief when he sees she is among the seven survivors of a ferry accident that claimed more than a thousand other lives. In a more, shall we say, American film, there might be the implication that she will do the same for Auguste as well, but Kieslowski doesn’t seem to be very interested in that sort of story. Then again, an American version might have also shown Auguste’s dog somehow survived that accident.
I’ll just pretend the news didn’t care to mention the dog’s survival. I do have a soft spot for dogs.
That may be the whole deal with Red and perhaps this trilogy as a whole: there’s the theme, but the film doesn’t beat you over the head with the idea. Fraternity is there, but no one says as much directly. It’s just something that comes with being human. Then again, I might wants to see Blue and White at some point to see how they handle their respective themes. All I know for now is, the Stacker list only made mention of Red.
NEXT: I follow up two films in languages I don’t speak with two silent ones. And for the first, well, I’m not even sure which version I am going to even see. Come back soon when I explain what that means when I cover 1927’s sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis.
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