At the EUROPA EUROPA FILM FESTIVAL (4 March 2023) - Janice Tong's introduction to Krzysztof Kieslowski's THREE COLOURS: RED (France, 1994)

Krzysztof Kieslowski

Janice Tong writes: What follows is a longer version of my intro to the sole Sydney screening of Three Colours: Red at the Ritz Cinema in Randwick on Saturday, 4th March 2023. This screening was of the newly restored version of the film, in glorious 4K; and was part of the Europa! Europa Film Festival (where the other two films in the trilogy were also shown).

My utmost gratitude to Angelica Waite for giving me this opportunity to introduce Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Red at this year’s Europa! Europa Film Festival. And a massive thank you to Cinema Reborn’s Chair, Geoff Gardner, for his always generous support and guidance.

Note that the Three Colours Trilogy is currently available to stream on SBS on Demand. Blue, White and Red.

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We come to the end of the trilogy, and in fact, what was to be the last film by the masterful Krzysztof Kieslowski, who died only two years after its release – Three Colours: Red is an epitaph and epiphany rolled into one. An epitaph because Kieslowski had already announced his retirement when Red premiered at the Cannes Film Festival – well ahead of his untimely death. This is a film that Kieslowski himself deemed worthy to be his last work. An epiphany, because despite its melancholic tone, a certain joie de vivre emanates from the labyrinthine doublings within the film. Kieslowski’s cinema is all about making connections – in his own words, it’s about “subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide” because there are too many things that do that already.

 

Fraternity, brotherhood, connections; to be sure, Red brings out these elements; but it could be a film about liberty or equality too. The Three Colours trilogy doesn’t only come to represent the tri-colours of the French flag, blue, white, red and their respective symbolic meaning, but in how these ideologies hold true universally. 

Samuel Le Bihan as the photographer with Irene Jacob
Three Colours:Red

 

In Kieslowski’s cinema these themes are represented loosely; a tenuous map of a universe that is unknowable but not unknown. The hand of fate inscribes itself into the viewer’s subconscious. But not in the fatalistic way or when a narrative is sign-posted. Instead, Kieslowski wants his audience and his actors to make connections of their own. 

 

In a way, this film reminded me of Chungking Express by Wong Kar-wai, a film that also came out in the same year as Red in 1994. Although stylistically different, the moods of the two films echo a kind of existential loneliness. Despite the many ways of connecting: technology, planes, telephones, music…but really, a chance encounter is all that is needed to impart meaning to these connections. But only if we pay attention, because prophecy never comes fully formed.

 

It’s almost impossible to talk about Red without also bringing up the film that Kieslowski made just prior to the trilogy – The Double Life of Véronique, with Irène Jacob playing the dual role: Weronika, a soprano in a Polish choir who happens upon a busload of tourists, (her doppelganger, Véronique, amongst them). This other young woman was French, and was in turn taking photographs of the choir. At some point, both women can sense the existence of this other, but without knowing who they are longing for, or why.  

 

When a spy is tailing someone, their sole aim is to follow them sight unseen. In this way, to be successful, the follower needs to wipe out the existence of the person that they are, and to only live in the other’s trace – to become invisible in the shadows of this other – to be their double in spirit. In Kieslowski’s films, traces and doublings are everywhere; and yet, there is neither the follower or the followed; in simple fact, for either to exist, they do so because of the other’s existence, especially when they fall synchronously, unknowingly, in each other’s trace. 

Irene Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant

 

In Red; Irène Jacob plays Valentine, a young part-time model studying in Geneva. The great Jean-Louis Trintignant is a retired judge. There is a third person, a young barrister whose existence is in that metaphysical space between the two. Their lives interlink: destiny? a temporal kink? or a string of coincidences? Knowing that there are, of course, no coincidences in the world. Perhaps these are but moments that affirm the judge’s own existence. Whereas the anonymity of a city offers escape for Julie in Blue, in Red – it offers Valentine a number of possible connections.

 

The musicscape in Red links Valentine to the two Véroniques; the music of Van den Budenmayer; a Dutch composer who lived from 1755 to 1803, but who was ‘only very recently discovered’. Budenmayer is of course the fictitious invention by Kieslowski and his close collaborator, composer Zbigniew Preisner.

 

It’s funny to learn that Budenmayer is now still cited in some discographies. Kieslowski was himself amused when he received requests from the Oxford Music Encyclopaedia enquiring as to who this composer was and where they would be able to purchase his music, followed by a cease and desist letter from the Oxford University Press for having used his music illegally when Kieslowski tried to tell them that the composer was in fact, not real. 

 

Music is very important in Kieslowski’s films. A sonic layering in Red is done with a very long bolero, comprising of two motifs that interweave to combine into a single piece at the end.  

 

Kieslowski started working with Preisner in 1985 in the film No End. In that film, traces of Blue could already be found in its sonic signature and in the narrative. This also marked his collaboration with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, a judge and barrister from Warsaw. Kieslowski wanted to make a documentary about the Polish judicial system; and Piesiewicz was his way into a courtroom. But very soon, they both caught on that something strange was happening; for every case they attended with a camera in the room, the judge didn’t sentence the accused. Throughout the eighty or so trials they attended, not more than seven minutes of film was shot, and no sentence was passed down. These encounters saw the two Krzysztofs bond. That also how Piesiewicz came to be the screenwriter for No End. Piesiewicz has since co-written seven of Kieslowski’s 11 feature films, including the Three Colours trilogy. Fun fact: there were actually four versions of the script for each of the three films. 

The colours are united at the end
Three Colours:Red

 

For Kieslowski, much of the narrative is constructed in the editing room. He almost never rehearsed his scenes (although he did with Jean-Louis for Red – there were some long takes, and due to his accident Jean-Louis had mobility issues and had to use a walking stick throughout the shoot) and limited takes to only three. Instead, he worked closely with his actors to find a personal connection to the character. For Red, he asked Irène what her favourite childhood name was; it was Valentine. His pre-production was meticulous, to the point of scoping out the exact length a piece of music needs to be in a scene; in fact, 80% of the film’s music was already composed before the film was finished,  an unusual practice when scoring a film. But in knowing these details – Kieslowski said that he was able to invite spontaneity and chance into the scene.

 

These invocations also come in the form of optical cues that recur across the trilogy; and throughout Kieslowski’soeuvre. Traces that stitch together his filmic universe.  Some are more obvious than others; but most are oblique, so that it catches you unawares. Something may seem familiar in a passing moment, but you can’t quite place what it is. Kieslowski likes using space in this way: locations, buildings, hallways, staircases, something in the street, or an exterior shot; shown in another scene, from an alternate angle, or with a different context, similar shots but in a different city. Places become both familiar and jarring. This is his way of accumulating a kind of memory map that guides our way into his mysterious universe of chance and encounters.

 

It took a very short time to shoot and edit the three films in the trilogy. The fact that Kieslowski was known to be a bit of a workaholic.  He made 48 films, comprising 11 features, 19 documentaries, 12 TV films, and 6 short films in 30 active years. He was planning another trilogy when he ended up in hospital. This trilogy was based on Dante’sDivine Comedy. It took only 8 months from September 1992 to May 1993 to complete the shoot for all three films of the trilogy – spanning three countries with only 10 days' rest between White and Red. When he was shooting Red during the day, he was editing Blue at night. And perhaps working on these films concurrently and so intensely, gave a sense of added connection to the trilogy. He was able to leave us with an indelible imprint – as though our subjectivity cannot help but be inscribed passively by the world. Although each of the three films are independent of each other, together, they give us a glimpse of why we are here, how we are to live.

 

If Red feels like a very intimate film; that is because it is. The wish to find friendship, the desire to find love, for the first time or anew. Preisner described it well, when talking about the music he wrote for his friend, Kieswslowski’s funeral: “There were only very few people I wanted to spend time with. One of them was Krzysztof. This prayer is also a request that such a friendship could be found once more.”

 

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