The Guild Cinema brought Krzysztof Kieslowski's seminal Three-Colors Trilogy to the big screen for some September matinees. A visit with our favorite filmmaker of all time has been long overdue. We soon will also revisit his masterpiece, "Dekalog."
RED (1994) (A-minus) - Kieslowski concludes with a return to his common theme of characters with little in common bonding nonetheless. He also re-installs a strong female lead, Irene Jacob as a young student/model forging an awkward friendship with a retired judge who eavesdrops on his neighbors' telephone calls.
Like "White," this film depends on a slow build. Pay attention early on. I had a little trouble keeping track of the characters. The narrative structure is precise, though. Jacob's Valentine has a jerk of a boyfriend whom we hear only by phone, from England, and she also has a neighbor that she doesn't know about, Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit), who is dating Karin (Frederique Feder), who runs a weather-forecasting service by phone. (There are a lot of phone calls in this analog-era movie.) And those are just the side characters.
Valentine hits a dog with her car and tracks down the owner, the grumpy judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who tells her to keep the dog. She soon discovers that he is listening in on his neighbors' calls, and he shows no remorse over the hobby. One of the neighbors has a secret gay lover; another is Karin, the weather gal; one man might be trafficking drugs. All the while, a giant billboard of Valentine, swathed in red, hovers over the city (Geneva).
Valentine and the judge share personal stories, and layers of their personalities are revealed. They draw close. The judge faces a reckoning over his invasive habit.
Jacob, who broke through in 1991 in Kieslowski's "The Double Life of Veronique," is a steady but sometimes dull presence here. She often gives off some combination of a pout and a vacant stare; maybe that's intentional, seeing as she's playing a model. But Valentine steadily deepens as Kieslowski patiently builds his puzzle.
If you've seen "Red" before, you know that it builds to a moment of semi-magical realism, a surreal coincidence that brings back characters from the previous two films in the trilogy. (We also get a conclusion to the long-running sight gag of the bent-over old woman struggling to place a bottle into the opening of a recycling container.)
Visually, Kieslowski and cinematographer Piotr Sobocinski play with shading, angles and reflections. In key scenes, interacting characters are set at different heights; that might be a signal or just a neat stylistic flourish. Close-ups of broken glass appear at critical moments, another theme carried over from his previous work.
"Red" feels like one substantial reckoning, a settling of a lifetime of scores for the various characters, notably the judge, and a wish for the future. Kieslowski had announced that it would be his final film. Sadly, he would die two years later at age 54. What he left behind is deeply profound. It's a minor consolation that he wrapped up his career so neatly, sweetly and perfectly.
Note: "Red" is one of the rare films to have a perfect 100% score on Metacritic.
Here are links to the other films in the trilogy: "Blue" and "White."
BONUS TRACK
A snippet of the soundtrack, by Zbigniew Preisner:
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