Three Colors: Red
THREE COLORS: RED
[1994. Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski. Cast: Irène Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant. Miramax/Miramax Home Entertainment. French with English Subtitles. 98 mins.]
If, as Aristotle once said, friends are two people who inhabit the same soul, then Red is a four-cornered mismatch. And like an uneasy rectangle, Red's soulful extra half in this movie is ultimately a bit much of a maddening crowd.
Krzysztof Kieslowski's last installment of three films based loosely on the French tricolors wrestles mightily with the idea of fraternity. But "wrestles" is only an approximate word because the film's ambiguous conclusion reveals some serious hesitations on Kieslowski's part to endorse friendship as a simplistic panacea for interpersonal strife.
Perhaps Kieslowski finds himself trapped by social convention. Or perhaps his view of the intrinsic nature of the sexes won't allow him to follow through with the arch of his narrative. In a trilogy marked by remarkably indeterminate conclusions, Red is the most enigmatic story of this series.
Fashion model Valentine Dussaut's (Irène Jacob) personal life is a mess. Her self-absorbed filmmaker boyfriend, Michel, is working in London; where he calls her at all hours trying to check on her whereabouts. One night Valentine accidentally runs over a dog who is owned by a misanthropic retired Judge Joseph Kern (Jéan-Louis Trintignant). The two immediately repel each other; yet they also viscerally sense there's an unspoken bond that unites them in their loneliness.
At the same time, law student Auguste Bruner (Jéan-Piérre Lorit) is consumed by jealousy when his girlfriend, Karin (Frédérique Feder), begins a liaison with another man. After Valentine and Kern acknowledge the fact that the 40 years between them are too great a gulf to unite them, a series of coincidences will eventually link her with Auguste.
What's most interesting about this film is Kieslowski's ambivalence about Valentine's and Kern's future. For not only do he and co-script writer, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, not bring these two mismatched personalities together (and thus give up theall-too-easily achieved melodramatic set-up); but he also doesn't allow either much rest apart. They are fated to be sundered and life will force them further apart, but their friendship (if this is indeed what they share) merely moves them towards an uncertain mid-game.
Ever the existential artist--indeed, quite possibly the finest psychological filmmakers of the 1990s--Kieslowski pivots his film expertly upon the reefs of personal anguish. For Valentine and Kern are not only far enough apart in age to be interpersonally disjointed, but they're close enough in emotional sympathy to feel the inevitable attraction that kindred spirits sense when they're together.
Kern's pained (yet hesitatingly hopeful) bearing as he anxiously watches a televised news broadcast of a collapsed ferry upon which Valentine (and Auguste) is trapped, sweeps a gamut of emotions on his face. For it was his wish to speak with Valentine one last time before she reconciled with Michel that maneuvered her on that fateful voyage. Now he may have indirectly contributed to his newfound friend's untimely death.
Looking through Trintignant's hesitatingly idealist eyes for this brief moment, Kieslowski tells us heaven and hell are not mystic realms of another dimension. Both are, rather, tenuous aspects of the mind's indecisiveness of flesh and the goodwill of conscience.