Search - Red (Three Colors Trilogy) on DVD

John C. (bookwheelboy)
Reviewed on 12/4/2007...

Truly remarkable.

Red is the color of love

Dennis Littrell | SoCal | 08/22/2000

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a sometimes clever, sometimes corny, but always beautiful story of predestined love. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a retired judge, corrupted by an all-consuming cynicism, who meets a beautiful girl, but doesn't fall in love with her. Instead, his reincarnation does, and he mystically orchestrates their predestined meeting. The girl is played by Irène Jacob, who is earnest, warm, uncorrupted and beautiful. She's a French model unloved by her boyfriend (fool that he is) with a demeanor proud, but not vain, vulnerable, but not weak.The judge is so pathetic that he spies on his neighbors' phone conversations to spice up his lonely and pitiful existence. Their love affairs, their spats, their crimes are piped into him as he sits alone in his house. But she has the genius to appreciate him and to understand him, and so frees him from his bitterness.We see in this, the final third of director Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy, something reminiscent of his countryman, Roman Polanski, in his passion for young actresses and his ability to bring out the best in them. We see further in the character of the retired judge a projection of ideas about how an old man, past any pretense, might love a young woman: wisely, delicately, from a slight distance, without a hint of lechery. Irène Jacob makes us believe that innocence and instinctive goodness are wondrous qualities, regrettably not much touted these days. More often depicted are women who would rather sing proudly of being bitches while acting out violent, two-fisted, emulations of a bogus masculinity, e.g., see "Single White Female," etc.Red is for her lips, for the color of curtains and theater seats, for the color of her true love's utility vehicle (often in her sight, but not yet recognized), for doors and panels and for the warm beat of her heart. Her name is Valentine. She is the dream of the worldly man who has known many women, whose head is not easily turned. And red is for the ringing of the phone, heard in its urgency as red.I liked this better than Blue or White, both of which were very good; but the clash of innocence and cynicism here, with youth and age so aptly contrasted, along with a clever plot (Kieslowski loves to surprise us), highlighted by captivating performances from the leads, make this the best of the three."

You can actually feel your heart lifting as you watch it.

darragh o'donoghue | 05/24/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"'Red' is the most magical of the 'Three Colours' trilogy, one in which metamorphosis or spiritual transformation is central. 'Blue' and 'White' could never be confused with social realism, but both were true to the inner, poetic reality of their protagonists. This isn't the case with 'Red' - none of its four main characters can be said to dominate the film: although there is definitely a controlling consciousness, it's not clear whose it is. As always with Kieslowski, the film's first sequence sets out its strategies in miniature. On an unexceptial Genevan (NOT Parisian!) street, the camera picks out one character and his dog, abandons them to peer into the bedroom of its heroine, Valentine, a student and model with a jealous boyfriend we hear but never see, who is working in England. Despite the technical virtuosity of this one-shot sequence, this opening could be considered realistic: we are introduced to characters and their environment. But there are two details that work against this. The heroine lives above a cafe called Chez Joseph, which also happens to be the name of the film's anti-hero, the misanthropic ex-judge Kern, who eavesdrops on his neighbour's telephone conversations by radio. This is only the first of the film's many patterned coincidences which take us out of psychological realism into a different kind of storytelling (the cafe sign is in red which will similarly, anti-realistically, be splashed throughout the film).The second detail is that the heroine is not introduced by her self, in person, but by her voice on the answering machine. Immediately we have a split within selves, between the present and the absent, that proliferates in this film of doubles, shadows and correspondances. Not only do characters mirror others, but individual characters see their identities diffused through different media (telephones, photographs, newspapers, TV, radio etc.), means of mechanical reproduction which assume a fetishstic or spiritual power. Despite its apparent realism, then, 'Red' is a work of magic or fantasy. When Valentine first enters Kern's dark, dank bungalow (a modern Plato's cave), having run over his dog, the camera takes on the sinister point-of-view familiar from slasher films, while the bleeping radio sounds announcing the judge seem like the laboratory appurtenances of a mad professor. In the second, more important meeting, the fact that Valentine is crossing thresholds into a magic realm is doubly signalled. The gate and dooorway is guarded by the mythical dog who brought the pair toghter, by way of a church. Before she enters, a wind suddenly shivers the leaves of a framing tree; later, at the moment we are supposed to hate him for his moral nihilism, Kern summons a blinding epiphany of sunlight. He may be a monster, but in his 'eavesdropping' on others, his making connections between disparate, disorganised lives and his creating consoling fictions in the face of tragedy, Kern is a substitute for both director and viewer. In the figure of the young judge, who seems to exactly replay the older man's life (both of whom are never seen in the same scene), we have that haunting Proustian conflation of past, present and future, the outer world and inner life, that Kieslowski strove for, but didn't quite catch, in 'Blue'.'Red' is the most sympathetic of all the films in the 'Three Colours' trilogy. Perhaps this is because red is a warmer colour than blue or white. Or because Preisner's score is lusher, almost celebratory, close to Maurice Jarre. Maybe it's because Irene Jacob is a much more open, generous actress than her predecessors - like her name and colour, Valentine seems to irradiate love. Sometimes her innocence is too ideal to be true, and we find ourselves much more drawn to the fascinatingly ambiguous, charismatic, persuasive figure of the judge. Their stagy dialogues could have had the banal quality of Shavian dialectic if it wasn't for the metatextual patterns that cast shadows around the coherence of their words, shadows that make the film at once soul-soaring and unforgivingly bleak - is salvation of the few really worth the deaths of thousands?"

Fantastique! Of all the movies to be unavailable...

Dennis Littrell | 09/27/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Originally, this was the third of the trilogy that I viewed, and it totally blew the first two away. After a long search to find this for sale on video (okay, I basically gave up), I found it and had the pleasure of being blown away by it a second time. This is one of those movies that you don't think of immediately when someone asks for a recommendation. Even as I write this, my memories of the movie are secondary to my memories of how amazed I was by it. It's like I'm watching it for the first time every time. Not many movies can do that."