Another virtual meet-up with Kino Clubhouse! We delved into the cinema classic Three Colours Trilogy by Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieślowski. Our assignment was to watch at least one of the films in the trilogy. Everyone agreed that Blue was the favorite of all time, and the most memorable from the trilogy.
Below is our conversation.
Still from Blue (1993).
Paola (she/her): I got really into the emotional intensity. The way Blue studies grief and processes grief for me. Love Juliette Binoche! Liked the historical time when it was made and the European unification when it was made. Red would be my second favorite; I loved the study of friendship and kinship. My least favorite was White; hard to watch. I kept stopping it and didn’t see where it was going. I loved the main male actor but wished Julie Delpy was in the movie more.
Still from White (1994).
Benji Hom: Loved that the White film was a dark comedy of trying to win her back. I don’t know how long it is in the guy’s head to win his ex-wife back. All these films are interesting. I found White to be the most interesting because he shoots himself in his suitcase and steals the suitcase…the awful music with the comb and the irony of a hit job but ends up killing himself.
Katherine St Asaph (she/her): I found the White movie to be unfair and anachronistic.
Klay Enos (he/him): White is the only political entry in the trilogy. The utopian aspect of celebrating the unification of Europe in Blue is bland; an euro identity that looks perfect, too perfect to be placed in the historic moment in IRL. White, though, the sense of humor of the main protagonist finally arriving home in a suitcase was interesting. The self-consciousness that Poland is viewed by the rest of the world. This was Kieslowski’s only chance to make a movie that looked at post-communism Poland, and was more critical of France’s (Delpy represents France) satirical edge of Poland.
Benji Hom: White is like impotence. The marriage fails because he “can’t perform” on his wedding night. He isn’t successful in France but when he returns to Poland, he rises in real estate and other entrepreneurial ventures. The main protagonist asks, “Will I not receive fair judgment since I don’t speak French?
Annette Insdorf (Professor in the Graduate Film Program of Columbia’s School of the Arts)
Annette’s book
Still of Dominique in jail in White (1994).
Klay Enos (he/him): I wanna reference Annette (Double lives, second chances : the cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski by Annette Insdorf). Characters are windows. The scene where Julie Delpy is in prison, the focus of the camera loses the image of the bars of the prison cell. What makes Blue more exciting than White is the amount of in-camera effects and camera uses to reflect interior moods. White is straightforward, and gives the depth that was lacking in the movie otherwise.
Alexander Ho: Is White the only one that is a man’s story?
Everyone: Yes.
Still from Red (1994).
Alexander Ho: Red becomes like the shared man and woman’s main story.
Benji Hom: In Blue, the moments in the pool were really memorable to me…The idea of love…and when she calls the other composer over, and has sex for the first time parallels to the end of the movie for me.
Klay Enos (he/him): Red lost some of the power watching today, 2022…based on landline phone calls and phone tapping. The surveillance aspect that we have private lives but none of our lives are private – aware of everything that is going on. The Judge is cynical and jaded to life.
Katherine St Asaph (she/her): Everyone has perfect knowledge of other inferiorities.
Paola (she/her): (In Red), I’m surprised that the judge turned himself in.
Benji Hom: In Red, the part where he was having a dream of her when she was 40 or 50 and thinking of growing older and not getting bitter and not letting the world transform her…
Katherine St Asaph (she/her): The dream was of a different nature and withheld it because he was convinced that privacy was important especially in these matters.
Benji Hom: The judge is clearly holding back. I’m relating the relationship of the judge and model in the red movie to the relationship of Bob and Scar Jo in Lost in Translation like romantic without the sexual component.
Paola (she/her): Reminded of the relationship of Amelie (from the movie of the same name) and the glass bone neighbor to the relationship of judge and model in Red.
Alexander Ho: Yeah, like the sense of alienation and melancholy search for connection in a cityscape.
Klay Enos (he/him): The quote from the Kieślowski book by Annette and the theme of red is a conditional mood. What would happen if the judge was born 40 years later?
Benji Hom: The movie is timeless. For example, (Roger) Ebert would say that films don’t change but viewers do. Ebert would see the film La Dolce Vita several times and see something different every time. In Red, she first hates him and doesn’t like him but then grows to like the judge. The judge is not welcoming. A lot of French critics were pissed that Kieslowski didn’t make a film solely about France and included Poles and Swiss. The cinema of Esperanto.
Klay Enos (he/him): I like White because it has the most bite and critical attitude about the cultural supremacy of Western Europe…French pride and history. Blue is the most positive. Why is Red situated in Switzerland and related to fraternity? Maybe about neutrality and unification of Europe?
Check out Three Colours Trilogy streaming on The Criterion Channel.
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