Film Review: Three Colours: Red

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Starring: Irène Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Frédérique Feder
Running time: 99 minutes

Three Colours: Red, the final film in Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s illustrious art-house career, set against the backdrop of Switzerland in the nineties and adorned by an aesthetic tribute to the colour red, is a 100-minute philosophical, romantic reflection on the condition of the human soul. 

In this red-hazed Swiss-French excitement, we follow model Valentine, whose physical - and eventually emotional - impasse from her fiancé ushers her into soft, sullen ruminations on human interconnectivity and the ethics of privacy versus intrusion. 

After an unsuccessful phone call with her fiancé, whose interest is taken up by his ever-expanding voyage around Europe, Valentine finds herself bound up in a fog of overflowing emotional confusion. Unable to see clearly, she runs over, but doesn’t kill, a dog belonging to Joseph Kern, a retired judge whose leisure time is occupied by tapping into the phone calls of their neighbours. 

The bond the two create over the course of the film is the conduit for Kieslowski's philosophising. When we look at human connection, we see that one soul usually takes on the purification process of the other. The essence of purity becomes the crux of Valentine and Kern’s bond. 

One would assume that Valentine, with her youthful absent-mindedness, is unknowingly purifying the bitter, oldened soul of Kern. This is somewhat true - Kern exercises a largely uncommunicative spirit, with glimpses of his genuinity only revealing themselves in the company of Valentine - but, what is largely more interesting is the idea that it is Kern who is purifying her. Not through lessons and platitudes, but by allowing her to revel in human curiosity, and thus revel in the parts of herself she keeps hidden and closed off. 

Valentine condemns Kern for violating their neighbours' privacy by tapping into their telephone calls, but when a situation arises in which one of their neighbours goes through the whole ordeal of importing a phone from Japan in order to hide his large-scale heroin dealings, her curiosity is piqued and they enter a ‘spying-together’ style sequence. 

This shared activity purifies her, not by exposing the impurities of civilistion, but by allowing her to dissolve into the curious imperfections of her own humanity. The cross-over from moral righteousness to the soul's innate curious desires actually acts as an embedded source of purification. Kern, with his blaise immorality, allows Valentine, whose soul has always suffered from a lack of shadows, to look at life from a perspective that is perhaps traditionally immoral, but wholly more introspective and meaningful. 

With the film's artistic epicentre being red, you cannot separate its moral message from its aesthetic one. In a very literal sense, the colour red acts as a visual intensifier. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Theory of Colours wrote that "one can very easily elevate and lift yellow into red, through thickening and darkening”.  This very literal ‘darkening’ can be picked up and placed in moral correlation to this film's focus on red symbolism. Kieslowski darkens and intensifies every emotion here. Each aspect of dialogue, every internal rumination, all achingly unsaid words are cloaked in sultry, darkened hues of red that intensify all aspects of the human condition. 

"All I want is peace and quiet."
"There won't be peace without me."

There is a sustained malaise amongst all characters derived from the understanding that they are not a key component in one another's peace. 

Valentine's fiancé, who exclusively appears in the medium of telephone calls, becomes frustrated at Valentine's lack of peace without bothering to be its provider. Valentine craves her fiancé's dispeace to bring about her own. The judge holds onto a stubborn fixation that Valentine is disturbing his peace and Valentine holds, with equal rigidness, the moral need to reinstate Kern’s. 

The conflation between peace and the human soul is what makes Three Colours: Red so hard to accurately analyse; the essence of the film’s philosophy, the soul, is not something to be grasped through the senses, only intuited, and Kieslowski intuites with such ease that he manages to imitate the most intangible aspects of the human soul. 

Three Colours: Red is now showing at Broadway Cinema