"Three Colors" - Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993-1994

Yesterday, some friends and I watched through the entire Three Colors trilogy. I compiled some quick thoughts about the trilogy film by film, the resulting blurbs of which are posted below. As a whole, the triptych is among the greatest cinematic achievements to which I've yet been a witness. The incredibly dynamic and varied films are helped by their marginal attachment to one another, allowing each work room to breathe as an individual piece, but always feeling better together.

Three Colors: Blue
If not the best of the trilogy (I personally think so, but critical consensus disagrees), Blue is certainly the quintessential work of the three, deftly sowing the seeds for the two to follow. The story of a woman grappling with the death of her husband and outlet for unleashing her creative capabilities becomes a vehicle for statements on European unification, individual alienation, and more. Binoche is, as has been mentioned everywhere else, excellent in her role, showing off a nuanced descent into cynicism and subsequent realistic confrontation with and resolution of her feelings towards the outside world. The sensory assault is singular and tastefully not extended to the other two films in quite the same way, used here to mark Julie's relapses into her old self with a flair of blue and an orchestral flourish. It's difficult, too, to avoid the obvious of the perplexing and wonderful fade-to-black moments in the film. Ultimately, this is a piece of cinema that, if looked upon a bit generously (there are certainly some signs of dating that I found more charming than off-putting, though others may disagree), has ample treasures to disclose. A flawed masterpiece, and they don't come any other way for me.
★★★★

Three Colors: White
You might have caught on even as someone who hasn't viewed the films that this is the least of the trilogy. It certainly doesn't need a white knight (hoho), as it is no insult to call it lesser than two excellent films, but some reflection yields that it is the perfect way to follow Blue and precede Red. It is the only film of the trilogy with a male lead and plays out as something of a comedy - an understated move that helps make the Three Colors as a unified work much easier to digest in a single sitting. Karol Karol is played wonderfully in what could be called a character arc if he didn't merely shift the location and means of his bourgeois lifestyle. He divorces his wife, played by Julie Delpy, in the court room briefly intruded upon by Juliette Binoche's character from the first film. From there, a homecoming to Warsaw and a devilish plan reunite him and Delpy for an evening of sexual satisfaction and subsequent legal troubles for the woman. The use of white here is far less obvious than the use of blue in the first (though to say it isn't still possibly too apparent for more neutral or cynical viewers would be a lie) and is much more easily decoded. Though it requires the context of Blue and Red to be elevated to a level that demands rewatching, this is no slouch as a fine meditation on the anxieties of a pre-EU Poland and the complex relations between East and West Europe.
★★★

Three Colors: Red
Commonly accepted as the best of the trilogy, Three Colors: Red shines most for me in its somewhat over-the-top final moments. The baffling ending to the excellent trilogy summarizes all there is to love (and hate) about it: the vague philosophical notion of teleology that permeates the films, the almost too well-structured plots they carry, and the spontaneous generation of some substance through a visual cue (the instant nostalgia of six characters all coming together in a secondhand video haze). The story here is structured well enough, with parallel experiences and heavy voyeurism playing into most of the intersections for a considerable part of the film. Primarily, the film follows Irene Jacob's Valentine (a far less interesting but perfect complement to Binoche's Julie from Blue) as she becomes closer to Jean-Louis Trintignant's elderly judge despite having walked into his illegal phone-tapping operation carried out largely, it appears, for his own reflection and little else. He even challenges her to make good on his insights, and she is unable to. This is perhaps the film where the central intended theme of fraternity is most obviously played out on screen, but it's the deeper implications of these ties that are interesting. One of the most fascinating observations I can make after one viewing is that Kieslowski delivers one of the most provocative pictures of early '90s attitudes about mass communication in that the film never takes an ideologically harsh stance for or against technology as a tool of unity. On the one hand, it pushes Valentine away from her English lover and, if we apply the term more broadly, keeps her from making it to him while ending the lives of hundreds near the end of the film. On the other, it brings her to a man who is presumably a budding lover by the end and serves as the final connection the viewer has to these characters with whom he or she has become so intimately attached over the course of roughly five hours: through a video screen showing a video screen.
★★★½