I don't watch movies with the mindset of providing a critical review or seeking movies to write about. Rather these recommendation posts reflect moments I finished watching a movie and felt driven to tell the world about it!
I only recommend movies I'm excited about and eager for you to see.
I have a bunch of little internal rules, that will not be listed, about which films I recommend in this format, and one of them I’m breaking here: movies that I’ve already seen before. I write the recommendations not only because I eagerly want other people to experience the movies I find exciting, but also to remind myself to revisit them. In a sense Past DB is recommending Future DB a return to what he found important at the time.
And in this case I feel I need the reminder because this revisit was the first time I saw these movies in almost twenty years, and I would be doing myself a disservice to wait another twenty years to watch these again.
For those not previously introduced, Krzysztof Kieslowski was a Polish director in the late 80s and early 90s that set the international art house circuit abuzz. He was pretty much set to be one of the biggest commanding voices in new cinema, something like an Eastern European Kurosawa, before his untimely death at the age of 54. Roger Ebert could never stop talking about his Dekalog series, film festivals fell over themselves for The Double Life of Veronique, and the Three Colors trilogy was met with excitement and anticipation the world over.
It turns out they’re also really fucking good.
Conceptually the three colors refer to the French flag and its associated color symbolism: blue = liberty, white = equality, and red = fraternity. What all three movies share at their core are soulful people seeking second chances in love, life, and mutual understanding.
Blue follows Julie, the survivor of a car crash that kills her husband and child. Julie seeks recovery in solitude, avoiding both the romantic interest of her husband’s friend and a public expecting her to help finish her dead husband’s music composition for the unification of Europe. Despite her desire to remove herself from her old life, she finds herself increasingly involved in her neighborhood affairs and eventually able to live again.
White follows a Polish transplant named Karol1 who is forced to divorce his French wife Dominique and sent penniless and alone back to Poland. With the help of a French-Polish resident of means and some amount of obsessive entrepreneurship, Karol builds a business empire and devises a long-con to get Dominique’s attention.
Red follows Valentine, a Swiss model who meets a lonely and embittered ex-judge who surveils his neighbors to sustain his cynical assessment of human nature. As Valentine and the judge get closer, her movements and activities dance around a young Swiss man who is recreating the retired judge’s lost love story in parallel. Valentine represents a chance for for the retired judge to rewrite the narrative and find new way to love.
The three movies feature allusions and intersections with each other, particularly surrounding a courthouse and a ferry accident.
So, good stories. But these movies are also just heart-achingly beautiful.
For some reason I was really into Kieslowski in the early years of my interest in cinema, but didn’t really keep watching them after college. This was a big mistake. Whereas it’s common as a teenager to be blown away by something novel to you, that upon revisit turned out not to hold that much depth or insight, I’m still astounded by the deftness, sensitivity, artfulness, and care in Kieslowski’s work.
These movies really are something special. It’s not just the good stories well performed. The imagery and editing is superb. But Kieslowski also has an amazing, poetic ear for both music and sound design that frankly should be attended to and studied in its own regard.
In The Double Life of Veronique he features a sequence where a man gives Veronique a cassette tape with audio clues on where to find him. What I found revisiting Three Colors is that Kieslowski does a ton of storytelling in just audio while you stare at a person’s reactions. It’s really easy to see all the blue items in Blue, white in White, red in Red and be like “Yeah he really pulled together the production design” but he does the exact same with the sound design.
A professor once told me that a filmmaker should be a painter, musician, and poet, and Kieslowski nails each aspect at a high level. The whimsy and wonder of the world is presented with love and tenderness and a deep understanding of passion and sadness.
Also, White shows Kieslowski has a sharp sense of humor.2
Overall my pitch is that if you’re interested in cinema as an art form, Three Colors is at the heights of craft and artfulness. You’d be doing yourself a disservice to neglect it.
But if you’ve seen it before, you should watch it again. It’s time. The circumstances around my revisit involve remastered versions being shown at Lincoln Center, but this is a series of movies that probably need to be watched every five years or so on whatever medium or format you have available.
I’ve been revisiting a lot of the movies I used to love but haven’t seen for a while. Some I am glad to now set aside as no longer as relevant as they once were, others are great moments to return to my passions and inspirations.
Kieslowski’s movies, however, are clearly the type of movies that change and grow with you, becoming insightful in brand new ways as you develop as a person. They are fine-tuned to enough details and sentiments of the human condition that I truly believe there’s insight within them for everyone.
A note on White: most American marketing material and cover art surrounding this trilogy feature Julie Delpy as Dominique as representative of the movie’s central character. Dominique, however, is only in about a fourth of the film or less. It’s Karol’s story, and a teenage DB felt very much mislead by “three movies = three women” presentation of cover art, trailers, etc. It means I didn’t give White it’s proper due when I first saw it.
There are good jokes throughout the three movies but White is arguably a revenge comedy.