"Three Colours: Red" (Language - French) (1994) - Movie Review

Sunken streets and pasted water on the stones of the road becomes a live wallpaper in the “Three Colours: Red”, the final piece of the trilogy by director Kieślowski. Similarity in various people’s life is coincidence and when we learn the end of this film, it is more than coincidence flooding our thoughts with limitless possibilities. Is it a past in present or future in the past or is it merely a present? Yet without any answers we are not worried about the riddle rather it is the merging of numerous hearts, some defined, some never gets its name.

In the sullen roads of a big town with a small busy street lives a model Valentine (Irene Jacob). She has a long distant boy friend shooting questions and loading annoyance, yet she needs some one to confide on her lonely days. Accidentally hitting a dog, she traces the owner, a man with no empathy only to take care of the dog herself. A neighbour of her Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit) is in love with a blonde Karin (Fredirique Feder) preparing for his exam for becoming a judge. Both Auguste and Valentine cross each other as stranger and yes they would end up together but not in the manner we have been used to. The film is more about the lonely old man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who is the heartless owner of the dog as introduced and his developing acquaintance with Valentine.

He is an eaves dropper listening to the passionate encounter of his neighbour the head of the house with another man. His neighbour is a husband and a lovely father. When Valentine sees it, he does not hide it and motivates her to do the right thing, telling the man that he is listening. She could not do it but he knows the consequence of this. He has no attachment to whatsoever and the conversations of him with Valentine have nakedness. She while being humiliated as a human being by his acts of invading privacy is also impressed by his candidness. This drives her back to him and he has missed a woman or a person to speak his heart in a long while. In Valentine he sees the soul to listen and reads her eyes for his accurate judgments of events and personalities to be validated and wondered. A strange relationship blossoms.

It is beauty for the old man and he knows his limits when it turns into a trusty friendship. He cleans his act while both are in a photographic moment of washed up memories. The segment of Auguste is detached and that bothers but how it joins the film is a demonstrated method in films before in a clarity not seen before. The dry leafs in a deserted front yard of his house, the windows half covered with book cases and coffee tables, the table lamps shining lights engulfing the characters in its diameter with broken glasses and sounding silences some how tells me the French imagination in it. Not that I know much of the French art or an arduous follower of their films and for that case Kieślowski is Polish. Yet in the couple of films I have seen, they seem to have grasped the missing moments in the reality and the unnoticed pieces of time left in the emotions of two people. They see the surroundings and in the nostalgia and worries they blanket them with a comfort of picture perfect colours.

The obsession for finding reasons for events and naming relationships have always been the controversial and comforting factor of people. Age, sex, religion, colour, jobs and factors undefined have determined the sustainability and possibility of a relationship. It might start but not necessarily finds its end. Here in between a man in island syncs up with a young woman unknown of her presence. They take time to understand each other and end up becoming more than friends and less than lovers.

There are connecting events and reoccurring characters in three films which I have failed to mention in other two. It is mainly because of how it is used as a preference of resemblance of sitting in Kieślowski’s trilogy film than a matter of significance. But he reminds us of its importance. In “Blue”, there is an old lady bent all the way down trying to dump a bottle into a dumpster high above her. Julie Vignon the widow numbed in pain watches that but does not help. Similarly in “White”, the old lady goes unassisted and we are wondering what is wrong with these people and in this film it is ended as it should be. In this final film, it hints on various logics but with one proper feeling of ending a trilogy, complete.