Three Colours Trilogy Blu-ray Review

• 21st Nov 2011

The final films by acclaimed director Krzysztof Kieślowski, The Colours Trilogy beautifully capture and explore three unrelated sets of lives. Lamentation, pensiveness and growth make up a major part of these films but stripped down they never try to be anything more than a fly on the wall (or intercepting radio wave…) watching every day people in unexpected situations. There are artistic embellishments galore, or else you might as well be watching CCTV footage, but Blue, White and Red are to be admired for their dedication to reality if for nothing else.

Although they are stand-alone films one of the main points of the trilogy is that there is no such thing as real isolation; this permeates the films’ core and there are several themes which run throughout all three. Women. Strong women, weak women, average women, old women, insignificant women, Kieślowski is open to all types and focuses particularly on women and how they are affected (or not) by men.

The male main character in White, Karol, is driven solely by the emotional command a woman holds over him. In Blue Juliette Binoche’s Julie is sullen and withdrawn – at least she tries to be but female influences in her life stop her from retracting into her own hermit-like existence.  Only Red’s Valentine takes pro-active steps to improve her own and others’ situation out of an innate desire to better herself and those she meets. Kieślowski acknowledges this in a small but significant ‘scenelette’ which appears in each film showing each of the leads’ responses to watching an elderly cripple struggle to put a bottle in a recycling bin. Julie and Karol are far too self absorbed to even think about helping anyone, let alone themselves, and they watch the struggle impassively. Valentine looks curiously on before pushing the bottle through the slot herself. We hear a loud smash as it hits the bottom and breaks which could almost be symbolic of her attitude towards life.  The glass breaking may seem destructive but it is a bold movement from which you can’t go back, perpetrated by her and her alone. Just like her friendships and decisions. Karol and Julie do nothing to promote positive change. Even Karol’s successful business is motivated by bitterness and jealousy. Just a little something to get you started on the characters of these three individuals…

Anyway, to the stories themselves: Blue is the first in the trilogy and follows Julie after the death of her husband and daughter in a car accident. She gives up her home and her life and rejects society, or at least she tries to. But there was no way that living in a Parisian tenement building, albeit alone, would truly allow her to cut herself off and before long people around her start shaping her lonely existence. White is the ‘anti-comedy’ of the three. Karol, a Polish hairdresser is in Paris being divorced by his beautiful French wife for his inability to satisfy her in bed. Tough stuff! When he is left penniless and alone, the kindness of stranger Mikołaj lands him back on his feet in Poland, where the two of them become the owners of a financially successful business. Despite his success, Karol can’t let go of his shameful past or his love/obsession for his lost Domenique. Red is a much simpler affair and simply deals with Valentine’s life over a short period of time and specifically her relationship with the eccentric retired judge whose dog she runs over.

The three colours of course reference the French flag and the three French ideals it embodies, liberty, equality and fraternity. The question is do the films live up to the qualities they are named after? In losing her family and her connections to her ‘old’ life, Julie ought to be free to do whatever she wants but true liberty is not so easily achieved, as she quickly discovers. She spends her free time swimming restlessly through a sea of blue-ness confined to a swimming pool but never gets any further than its tiled edges.

Karol learns very quickly that equality is all well and good on paper, but as he says himself in his court hearing “is my case not heard because I don’t speak the language?”Crucially, his bruised pride he won’t allow him to see himself on an equal plane with others, even when in fact he is much more successful than they are. Surrounded by the harsh, snow white horizons of his native Poland, white begins to look pretty cold to me…

Valentine, whose life is decorated in various shades of rouge, is wary of striking up relationships outside her comfort zone but embraces them at their first spark. I suppose the sentiment which ties these three films is friendship: it’s the element which keeps Julie from retreating into an isolated existence, which picks Karol up and puts him back on his feet after a nasty fall and which reassures Valentine that there is happiness to be found for anyone who looks for it, even in the strangest places.

I won’t pretend that having watched Blue, White and Red only once I have even begun to understand them on anything other than a very basic level but there is definitely more to be gained from these films than can be achieved with a first viewing. They are definitely worth owning on disc if you’re a people watcher yourself and all the more so on blu-ray for the definition it gives these twenty year old films. After all, you don’t want to be blurring white with yellow or blue with turquoise! With this layered trilogy you’ll need all the clarity you can get to delve beneath the surface and get the most out of them.

There are some fairly basic extras with the Blu-ray collection but not much in the way of anything offering artistic interpretation or justification for any of the bold creative decisions which made up these French classics.

Dani Singer