FILM: "Trois Couleurs: Rouge" (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994)

I’m going to attempt to talk here about what has recently become insupplantable as my all-time favourite movie. Usually with personal canons – Top 10 Films in particular – I find that the chosen candidates remain fixed, shifting only slightly over a number of years to accommodate developments in maturity and taste. However, I’ve never known a film rocket into a list of favourites with such disarming alacrity. When I revisited Trois Couleurs: Rouge a few months back, it hit me with the full force of a megaton bomb. I found myself utterly overwhelmed by it, and have since re-watched it several times with no diminishment of effect. Most great films make an immediate impression on the first watch; this one crept up on me with no prior warning.


Valentine (a radiant Irène Jacob) is a young model studying in Geneva. Physically and emotionally, she repeatedly pushes herself as far as she can go: above all else, she simply wants to feel. However, she finds herself searching for something that seems forever out of reach; she cannot put her finger on the exact cause of her disquiet, but she is all too aware of its existence.


While driving home one night, she accidentally runs over a dog. Her desire to return the animal to its rightful owner leads her to the home of an embittered former Judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who supplements his empty existence by listening in on his neighbours’ phone conversations. Valentine is disgusted by him, but finds herself inexplicably drawn to his fatalistic view of the world and keen to discover the reasons behind his misanthropy. From their initially hostile first meeting, it gradually emerges that he can apparently foresee events in the lives of his subjects, as if somehow able to predict the future.


Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Valentine, across town a young law student seems to be living a life directly parallel to that of the Judge. He experiences the same heartbreaks and devastations that have shaped the elderly jurist’s life. As Valentine’s friendship with the Judge deepens, her antipathy fades and a mutual understanding begins to develop. Eventually she announces her plans to journey overseas to visit her possessive boyfriend, whose detached voice we have heard throughout the film whispering declarations of love she knows to be untrue. The scene is set for her departure, and she and the Judge bid each other farewell. However, there’s a storm brewing…


For such a critically-lauded film, the first thing that strikes you about Red is how remarkably low-key the whole affair seems. Rather than being an immediately distinguished venture set on drubbing the viewer with signs of its lofty artistic intent (cf. The Double Life of Véronique and Blue), Red at first comes across like one of the most unlikely masterpieces ever captured on celluloid. However, just as Kieslowski deftly weaves his magic throughout its duration, so too do its riches start to reveal themselves as the picture gradually takes shape before our disbelieving eyes. Every scene evokes an air of calculated mystery, as if somehow being propelled by forces beyond our control; the camera’s leisurely movement and loving preoccupation with the eponymous colour are premeditated to sustain a sense of déjà vu, as if we somehow know each place that is visited intimately despite never having been there before.


My favourite scene in the film occurs right near the end, when the Judge and Valentine part company for the last time. The Judge asks to see her ticket before she leaves; when she hands it to him, he impassively checks it over before handing it back with an impenetrable expression on his face. Their fingers meet for a fleeting moment against the glass of the car window before he drives away. Asked precisely why the Judge inspects her papers, a typically elusive Kieslowski refused to comment, but to me the implication is clear: this is the final piece of the puzzle, the last remaining detail in his grand design. He is, as he has been throughout, in complete control of events. His undetected presence in the lives of the young law student and his unfaithful lover has led to the disillusioned cuckold boarding the exact same ferry as Valentine. The Judge has waited his entire life to rectify the mistakes of his youth; now the opportunity to finally achieve this elusive sense of equilibrium has come full-circle. Jean-Louis Trintignant gives an exceptional performance as the Judge, alternately cold, aloof and seductive as he slyly goes about correcting what Kieslowski described as “a mistake in time”.


Some reviewers have criticised the film’s apparently anomalous ending, in which Valentine and the younger Judge are among the last known survivors of a sea disaster, rescued along with the leading characters from each of the trilogy’s previous two films. However, to me this seems the logical conclusion to Kieslowski’s entire canonical thesis: they are saved for their spiritual connection to one another by an unstoppable force of nature and a director’s compassion. Ultimately their plight is exactly the same as the film-maker’s own primary concern: his characters are saved by love.


I always describe this film as being what might happen if someone reached inside me and daubed the way I feel every single day all over the screen. With the event of his untimely death in 1994 I’ll never get the chance to tell Kieslowski how deeply his work has affected me, and for that I’ll always feel somehow incomplete. At the film’s core lies an attractively simple but eternally moving conceit: that Valentine’s longing is for someone she is yet to meet, and that her inherent feelings of unease are about to be placated by forces way beyond her comprehension (“I feel something important is happening around me”).


Red is the crowning achievement of this remarkable talent, a man whose cantankerous outer surface frequently belied his inner warmth and humanity. Every composition and line of dialogue is rich with meaning; imagery and sound are seamlessly interwoven with such exactitude (note the moment when the Judge’s static appears on Valentine’s car radio prior to her hitting his dog) that to even attempt to find fault in its overall design proves utterly fruitless. Logistically, every last detail is accounted for; Red is the perfect distillation and refinement of themes that Kieslowski had been developing throughout his entire career. It is more fully realised than the elliptical Véronique, in which the notion of his protagonists’ mistakes informing one another is evocatively rendered but frustratingly intangible. It is more serene than A Short Film About Love, more incisive than Blind Chance and bursting with compassion, as if we have finally retreated into the inner sanctity of Dekalog 3.


The director famously resisted giving his own interpretation of the work, though he did admit that Red was his most personal output. Given that I suspect he knew it was to be his last film (he announced his formal retirement from directing at that year’s Cannes film festival as Red received its world première), here Kieslowski laid it all on the table. This is the film in which he told us exactly how he felt without ever making it explicit. You can look for concrete meanings or sordid insights into the man, but you won’t ever find them. However, it’s all there, even if it exists as something that can never be fully explained. Kieslowski’s communication is of the human heart and soul: the film is the poetic articulation of an existential condition that cannot be rationalised by such primitive tools as language or prose. Red is less of a film than an overall feeling - a work of hope, yearning, empathy and love. On a visual, intellectual, spiritual and philosophical level, it is the highest example of the cinematic artform imaginable to this writer. It is Kieslowski’s greatest gift to the world, and a part of me that can never be erased.