½½R, 98 m., 1994
Juliette Binoche (Julie), Benoit Regent (Olivier), Florence Pernel (Sandrine). Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski and produced by Marin Karmitz. Screenplay by Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, and Slawomir Idziak.
There is a kind of movie in which the characters are not thinking about anything. They are simply the instruments of the plot.
And another kind of movie in which we lean forward in our seats, trying to penetrate the mystery of characters who are obviously thinking a great deal. Blue is the second kind of film: The story of a woman whose husband dies, and who deals with that fact in unpredictable ways.
The woman, named Julie, is played by Juliette Binoche, whom you may remember from The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Damage. In both of those films, she projected a strong sexuality; this time, she seems to be beyond sex, as if it no longer has any reality for her. She lives in France and is married to a famous composer, who is killed in an auto crash early in the film. Now she must pick up the pieces of her life.
She doesn’t do that in the ways we think she might. She is sad and shaken, but this is not a film about a grieving widow, and, indeed, by the way she behaves we can guess things about her marriage. One of her first acts, after the initial shock wears off, is to call a man who was a colleague of both her and her husband, and seduce him. “You have always wanted me,” she says. “Here I am.” This sequence is not played for shock, nor does it even seem especially disrespectful to the dead husband: She seems to be testing, to see if she can still feel. She cannot. She walks out on the man and moves to the center of Paris, to what she hopes is an anonymous apartment on an anonymous street. She doesn’t want to see anybody she knows. She wants to walk through the streets free of her history, her memories, her identities. She wants to begin again, perhaps—or to be free of the need to begin.
Binoche has a face that is well suited to this kind of role.
Because she can convince you that she is thinking and feeling, she doesn’t need to “do” things in an obvious way. In the opening moments of Damage, she saw the Jeremy Irons character for the first time, and they were both struck by a powerful physical passion. She projected this passion, not by overacting or acting at all, but (as nearly as I can tell) by looking at the camera and projecting the feeling without obvious external signs.
Here, too, her feelings are a mystery that her face will help us to solve. The film has been directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski, born in Poland, now working in France, and, in the opinion of some, the best active European filmmaker (he made The Double Life of Veronique two years ago). He trusts the human face, and watching his film, I remembered a conversation I had with Ingmar Bergman many years ago, in which he said there were many moments in films that could only be dealt with by a close-up of a face—the right face—and that too many directors tried instead to use dialogue or action.
Think of how we read the thoughts of those closest to us, in moments when words will not do. We look at their faces, and although they do not make any effort to mirror emotions there, we can read them all the same, in the smallest signs. A movie that invites us to do the same thing can be very absorbing.
Eventually there is a surprise. Julie meets a woman she did not know existed—her husband’s mistress. The two women must deal with this discovery together. Watching this film, it was impossible not to think about Intersection, the Hollywood weeper starring Richard Gere, Sharon Stone, and Lolita Davidovich in an uncannily similar story of two women dealing with their love of the same man.
That film was an insult to the intelligence. This one, similar in superficial ways, is a challenge to the imagination. It’s as if European films have a more adult, inward, knowing way of dealing with the emotions, and Hollywood hasn’t grown up enough.
½R, 92 m., 1994
Zbigniew Zamachowski (Karol Karol), Julie Delpy (Dominique), Janusz Gajos (Mikolaj), Jerzy Stuhr (Jurek). Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski and produced by Yvon Crenn and Marin Karmitz. Screenplay by Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Agnieszka Holland, Edward Zebrowski, and Edward Klosinski.
The hero of White tries to make money by performing in the Paris Metro. But he is not a musician, and his instrument—a pocket comb with a sheet of paper folded over it—doesn’t inspire many donations. He’s reached the bottom of the barrel, this sad sack migrant from Poland whose beautiful wife has divorced him. And he is homesick. At last inspiration strikes. A friend is flying to Poland.
Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) will ship himself home curled up inside the man’s suitcase.
Is this possible? Better not to ask. The movie creates a great droll comic moment when the friend lingers at the baggage claim carousel in the Warsaw Airport until it becomes unmistakable that the luggage . . . has been lost. And then there is a scene showing that the missing suitcase, with Karol still inside, has been stolen.
Thieves open it, are bitterly disappointed to find only a man inside, and beat him. Then they cast him aside onto a rubbish heap. It is bitterly cold. Bloody but optimistic, he surveys the grim landscape and says, “Home at last.” Depending on your state of mind, these events may sound funnier, or more painful, than they really are. Krzysztof Kieslowski directs White in a deadpan, matter-of-fact style that treats his strange subject matter as if it were merely factual. White is the middle film in his trilogy based on the colors of the French flag, coming between Blue, which was about a woman coming to grips with the death of her husband, and the forthcoming Red, about a woman whose accidental friendship with a judge leads to profound changes in her life. All of these films approach their subjects with such irony that we cannot take them at face value; White is the anticomedy, in between the antitragedy and the antiromance.
Kieslowski is Polish, now working in France, and in White he considers the new, post-Communist Poland. His hero (whose name, Karol, is Polish for “Charlie,” not a coincidence), was a hairdresser before leaving for Paris, and he discovers that his brother is still operating the family salon. He agrees to do a few heads every day, and meanwhile looks around for opportunities. One quickly comes: The friend who shipped him to Poland now knows a man who wants to pay someone to kill him. A job’s a job, although this one eventually provides the most poignant moment in the movie.
A capitalist Poland provides opportunities for someone like Karol, who has soon schemed and maneuvered himself into a position of relative wealth, and begins a complicated plan to lure his former wife (Julie Delpy) back to Poland. His relationship to her is complicated; he has not been able to make love with her since their wedding day, but exactly how he feels about this, and what his plans are after her return, remain mysteries that the movie only gradually unveils.
Kieslowski allows a great deal of apparent chance in his stories. They do not move from A to B, but wander dazedly through the lives of their characters. That lends a certain suspense; since we do not know the plot, there is no way for us to anticipate what will happen next. He takes a quiet delight in producing one rabbit after another from his hat, hinting much, but revealing facts about his characters only when they must be known.
In all of his films, there are sequences that are interesting simply for their documentary content: We’re not sure what they have to do with the story, if anything, but we are interested to see them unfolding for their own sake. In Blue, the heroine’s pragmatic reaction to her husband’s death gave hints of greater secrets still to come. In Red, there are two lives that never quite seem to interlock, but always seem about to. In White, there is the marvelous indirection of Karol’s comeback in Poland, the way in which he becomes successful almost by intuition.
The colors blue, white, and red in the French flag stand for liberty, equality, and fraternity. One of the small puzzles Kieslowski sets up is how these concepts apply to his plot. As Karol deviously sets a snare for the wife he loves and hates—as he gains control of the relationship, in a way—it is hard to see how “equality” could be involved in such a struggle for supremacy. Afterward, thinking about the film, beginning to see what Kieslowski might have been thinking, we see even richer ironies in his story.
R, 95 m., 1994
Irene Jacob (Valentine), Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Judge), Frederique Feder (Karin), Jean-Pierre Lorit (Auguste). Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski and produced by Yvon Crenn and Marin Karmitz. Screenplay by Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz.
At this moment, in this cafe, we’re sitting next to strangers.
Everyone will get up, leave, and go their own way. And then, they’ll never meet again. And if they do, they won’t realize that it’s not for the first time.
—Krzysztof Kieslowski
One of the opening images in Red is of telephone lines, crossing. It is the same in life. We are connected with some people and never meet others, but it could easily have happened otherwise.
Looking back over a lifetime, we describe what happened as if it had a plan. To fully understand how accidental and random life is—how vast the odds are against any single event taking place—would be humbling.
That is the truth that Kieslowski keeps returning to in his work. In The Double Life of Veronique, there is even a moment when, if the heroine had looked out of a bus window, she might have seen herself on the street; it’s as if fate allowed her to continue on one lifeline after choosing another. In Red, none of the major characters knows each other at the beginning of the movie, and there is no reason they should meet. Exactly.
The film opens in Geneva, in an apartment occupied by a model named Valentine (Irene Jacob). She makes a telephone call, and the phone rings at the same time in an apartment just across the street, occupied by Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit), a law student. But she is not calling him. Her call is to her boyfriend, who is in England, and whom she rarely sees. As far as we know, Valentine and Auguste have never met. And may never meet. Or perhaps they will.
One day Valentine’s car strikes a dog, and she takes it to the home of its owner, a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant). He hardly seems to care for the dog, or for her. He spends his days in an elaborate spying scheme, using wiretaps to monitor an affair being carried on by a neighbor. There is an instant spark that strikes between the old man and the young woman—a contact, a recognition of similarity, or sympathy—but they are forty years apart in age, strangers to one another, and have met by accident, and . . .
The story becomes completely fascinating. We have no idea where it is going, where it could possibly go. There is no plot to reassure us. No goal that the characters hope to attain. Will the young woman and the judge ever meet again? What will come of that? Does it matter? Would it be good, or bad? Such questions, in Red, become infinitely more interesting than the questions in simpleminded commercial movies, about whether the hero will kill the bad guys, and drive his car fast, and blow things up, or whether his girlfriend will take off her clothes.
Seeing a movie like Red, we are reminded that watching many commercial films is the cinematic equivalent of reading Dick and Jane. The mysteries of everyday life are so much deeper and more exciting than the contrivances of plots.
We learn something about Auguste, the law student who lives across the way. He has a girlfriend named Karin (Frederique Feder).
She specializes in “personal weather reports” for her clients, which sounds reasonable, like having a personal trainer or astrologer, until we reflect that the weather is more or less the same for everybody. But perhaps her clients live in such tight boxes of their own construction that each one has different weather.
Valentine talks to her boyfriend. They are rarely together.
He is someone on the phone. Perhaps she “stays” with him to save herself the trouble of a lover whose life she would actually share.
She goes back out to the house of the old judge, and talks to him some more. We learn more about the lives he is eavesdropping on.
There are melodramatic developments, but no one seems to feel strongly about them.
And Valentine and Auguste. What a good couple they would make! Perhaps. If they ever meet. And if, in the endless reaches of cosmic time, there had been the smallest shift in the lifetimes of Valentine and the judge, they could have been the same age. Or another infinitesimal shift, and they would have lived a century apart. Or never lived at all. Or if the dog had wandered somewhere else, Valentine would not have struck him, and met the judge. Or if the judge had had a cat . . .
Think about these things, reader. Don’t sigh and turn the page. Think that I have written them and you have read them, and the odds against either of us ever having existed are greater by far than one to all of the atoms in creation.
Red is the conclusion of Kieslowski’s masterful trilogy, after Blue and White, named for the colors in the French flag. He says he will retire now, at fifty-three, and make no more films. At the end of Red, the major characters from all three films meet—through a coincidence, naturally. This is the kind of film that makes you feel intensely alive while you’re watching it, and sends you out into the streets afterward eager to talk deeply and urgently, to the person you are with. Whoever that happens to be.