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Tricolor French flag in
'Three Colors' by Kieslowski
Sunday, January 29, 2006
From my notebook
YÜKSEL SÖYLEMEZ
The late Polish filmmaker Krzystof Kieslowski became a filmmaker by chance,
but he left his imprint on celluloid as a great filmmaker.
He went to the Lodz Film Academy, to which he had been denied entry three
times, but ended up graduating in 1969. He proved to be a poet of cinema
art.
Kieslowski was born in Warsaw on June 27, 1941 and died there on March 13,
1996 at the young age of 55. He had already taken voluntary retirement after
shooting the third film of the "Three Colors" trilogy ("Blue" / "White" /
"Red").
He was a dedicated documentary filmmaker. Poland under communism was a great
source of concern for him. Communism united artists such as Andrej Wajda and
other directors under the "Cinema of Moral Anxiety." In the '70s he shot
many documentaries that brought him international acclaim.
He made his first feature film, "Underground Passage," in 1973. In 1975 he
made his second feature, "Personal," for TV, which won him the Grand Prix
prize in Manheim. "The Scar" in 1976, "Night Porters" in 1979 and "The
Camera Buff" in 1979 made him famous as a man of film art if not a box
office hit maker.
The “Three Colors” series -- "Blue," "White" and "Red" -- each separately
won him prizes such as the Academy Award nomination for best director for
"Red" in 1995. "Blue," my favorite, had already shared the Golden Lion in
Venice in 1993. However, "White" earned him the best director prize in
Berlin in 1994.
I started my get-to-know Kieslowski adventure on New Year's Eve 2005 by
watching his documentary, the portrait of a heavily smoking man who
exhausted himself in his short life.
“Red,” shot in French, is a simple story played by Valentine Dussaut as
Irene Jacob, a young model living in Geneva. She runs over a dog that
belongs to a mysterious retired judge living in social isolation, played by
Jean-Louis Trintignant. It is this accident that brings these two non-entity
strangers together in a most bizarre relationship of platonic love and
personal void, "compassion, redemption and understanding."
It is a weird story of a willful outcast, a lonely soul in the middle of
society who eavesdrops on the family dramas of his immediate neighbors. The
story is too far from real life by any stretch of the imagination to be
credible, while the acting is superb, with heavy suspense in places but too
farfetched to be convincing. The reaction of a normal person who runs over a
dog would be to rush it to a vet rather than look for the mysterious owner,
which is what she does, making it nearer to a thriller sort of atmosphere.
The film starts with this kind of unreal premise with the second
alternative. I kept my distance from the director's story, though the
treatment was professional as she helped him with friendship to confess his
crime of eavesdropping and come out of his shell.
The next day I sat down to watch "White," the second film of the trilogy. In
the French flag red is fraternity, white is equality and blue is liberty. In
"White," however, the message is that equality does not exist. Karol, a poor
Polish hairdresser working in Paris, extremely well played by Zbigniew
Zamachowsky, decides to return to Poland. He has an obsessive love for his
beautiful wife, Dominique, played by Julie Delpy. Due to impotence, his
marriage was never consummated and breaks up. He is driven out of France by
his estranged wife. In Poland he decides to make big money, albeit through
cheating and deception. He stages his fake death. His fake burial is
attended by his tormented wife, by now rich as he leaves all his fortune to
her in his will. His make-believe death creates so much joy for him that he
decides to appear to Dominique, who loses her mind at his reappearance. Love
endures, even in Julie's madhouse, as the penniless Karol who has lost all
his possessions, brings her marmalade.
The film is beautifully shot through a most complicated script. I watched it
with much interest, but like “Red,” what the film lacks is credibility.
There is not a grain of it in the whole story. It is closer to a dream than
any notion of reality in which the spectator can identify himself with
Karol, whose own life was nearer to hallucination. "White" was shot in 1994.
I watched "Blue" -- liberty -- last, and it became my favorite of the three.
It is supposed to be the first part of the trilogy. Juliette Binoche plays
Julie, a superlative star married to a much-acclaimed composer who is killed
in a car crash with their five-year-old daughter. Following a period of
spiritual suicide and complete solitude in Paris, she starts a new life free
of commitments in deep grief and love. She cannot avoid or disassociate
herself from her past connections, which keep intruding on her. A new
reality is created for her by friends and others. The music of her late
husband, which she once wanted to destroy, helps to recreate her. Julie
returns to the land of the living. Although she discovers her husband's
pregnant mistress, the baby is a new bond for the future.
This is cinematography at its best, which imposes itself with its philosophy
and poetry more than the simple story behind it, with one woman acting with
her whole self, body and soul, stupendously. This must be the reason, and
quite rightly, that it shared the Golden Lion award in Venice in 1993 as
Kieslowski's masterpiece.
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