Blue, White, Red.
The past is not a foreign country.
Despite the increase in passport checks we can still get to foreign countries, the past only lives in the movies. I often hear people discussing how a film hasn’t aged well, the irony being that in most cases the movie hasn’t changed, all the aging has been done by us.
30 years on from the release of “Three Colours: Blue”, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy is back in cinemas. These films, foreign, philosophical, rich with symbolism and bold in their artistic ambition were fundamental blocks in my cinematic education. So of course I jumped at the chance to rewatch them and see how badly I had aged.
30 years is a harsh quantity of time. Enough for the world to be strikingly different yet not so much that those differences feel comfortably alien. For instance, I also recently re-watched “Singing In The Rain” which ends with a group of middle-aged male studio execs heroically taking it turns to humiliate a beautiful woman for the crime of having a shrill working class accent. However that is the 1950s playing the 1920s, it’s uncomfortable the way “The Taming of the Shrew” is - it’s not ok but it’s a different type of not ok to the ‘90s.
In “Blue”, Julie’s liberty includes taking a lover and leaving him. It’s noticeable though that the view on this remains with the heartbroken Olivier. We wake with him to feel his surprise. We don’t see her watching him snoring on their soggy mattress, realising how desperately she needs to be alone. He lopes through the movie like a sad wet beagle, stalking her in a way that just feels creepy yet, as ever, he still ends up getting his girl.
My favourite passage in all three films is the irrepressibly joyful middle section of “White” in which downtrodden Karol Karol slowly turns his fortune around. For me Kieślowski’s greatest skill was in creating a sense of moral clarity, certainty, and then puncturing it. His preferred space is the limbo. The conclusion of “White” deliberately challenges the very sense of justice the story has constructed. Nevertheless this is the story of a man exacting an almost medieval revenge on his ex-wife. The ending is too delicate to be triumphant but she’s still in jail after they’ve had sex following his faked funeral. It’s not quite that he tricks her into sleeping with him but it’s not quite that he doesn’t. Like if you ask me for a cup of tea and I want a cup of tea but in the morning the police turn up and arrest me on suspicion of killing the cup of tea - no that metaphor doesn’t help in this instance.
Part of the brilliance of “White” is the way Kieślowski’s control of the edit places your attention where he wants it to be. There is a repeated sequence of Dominique entering a darkened hotel room which resolves not as a cut away or a memory but actually a flash forward. This is the moment Karol has been planning all along, what felt like a dream of longing is suddenly unfolding in reality. It’s simple but still astonishing. It creates a sense of inevitability which carries us to the end of the story, which is lucky because it stops us noticing that the accusations against Dominique make no sense in any language.
Similarly “Blue”, anchored by Juliette Binoche’s sublime performance, is a film that uses recurring themes in its music, edit and colour to beat you up with violent emotion. It remains a masterpiece of direction, Kieślowski again constantly directing your attention away from the story. That the actual narrative of “Blue” is the same as the recent film “The Wife”, shows how brilliant Kieślowski is at selling a story through the absence of detail. Still, I know this is Paris in the 90s, but a sex club that also screens the French equivalent of Newsnight Review? Really?
Lastly and least is “Red” a film so ‘90s it could have been called “The One With Lots of Red In It”. (On the theme of things aging badly), there’s a joke in Family Guy about the moment when the title of a movie is said in the movie. Now, whenever this happens, I hear Peter Griffin jubilantly shout “Oh, there it is!” Normally this only happens once, but watching “Three Colours: Red” I could barely hear the dialogue for the voice in my head shouting “Oh there it is!” “A Red car! There it is!” “Oh she’s wearing RED!” “OH THAT SHOP IS RED!!” “THERE IT IS! THERE IT IS! THERE IT IS!!!”
“Red” is at least prescient in the way it discusses the connected world of the modern internet, but at a time when the characters’ had no internet. Starting with the camera diving down the telephone lines, “Red” explores the 90s obsession with chance, coincidence and the interconnectedness of souls in the city but these ideas feel so commonplace that they are no longer enough to distract from the story.
Valentine, a young model, potters about Geneva being nice to strangers until she meets a grumpy old man eavesdropping on his neighbours. Really it’s his film and whilst Irene Jacob gets most of the screen time, she gets none of the plot. She is just the counterpoint to the bad woman who broke the old man’s heart and made him nasty in the way bad women do. As with “White” we see heartbreak caused by inconstant women, without a shred of male introspection. Did you guys really do nothing wrong?
In “Blue” a woman learns the limits of her lonely liberty. In “White” a woman is tricked into a lesson about justice. In “Red” a woman teaches kindness by having a sweet smile. This is hardly the battle cry of Marianne, leading troops into battle with her tits out. It is possible to put on “The Taming of the Shrew” and subvert its inherent misogyny. Channing Tatum and Margot Robbie could remake “Singing In The Rain” shot for shot and it’d come over fine. You can’t do that with the Three Colours Trilogy. Not yet at least. Its inherent sexism is still too close, too immediate, it is last night’s insult.
In this respect the Three Colours shows us what we have gained from our aging. “Blue” is the story of a woman who donated her genius to a man so that it could be accepted by society, now “Tár” uses a female lead as a beard to enable it to challenge concerns about male behaviour that once went unremarked. That even conservatives now couch their arguments in terms of a female gaze is some sort of progress.
Still, the saddest thing about returning to the Trilogy was seeing how the hope of 30 years ago played out. In “Blue” Julie composes her masterwork in celebration of the Unification of Europe. “Red” ends with all the main characters among the few survivors of a ferry disaster, despite the tragedy, in the end Liberty, Equality and Fraternity do make it to Great Britain. Kieślowski may have foreseen something of the nature of the internet age but he didn’t imagine Brexit.
The final reason why these films feel out of time, their stories difficult to transpose, is that they are a celebration of something achieved, something that no longer feels secure. If you were to attempt this project today then truly you would look for a Marianne - a warrior woman asking where is our equality? What have we gained from our liberty? Where is our justice?
Ideas in this post also crop up in my piece about subtitled movies, my piece about our current culture wars and my piece about our misconception of the nature of time.
This Saturday I’m running “HOW TO HAVE AN IDEA”, a half day taster for my 9 week screenwriting course which returns in June and apparently is “a true masterclass in screenwriting” and a “transformative learning experience”. Information here.