Kieślowski’s “Red” is the most philosophically dense film in the Three Colours trilogy. In his final entry, Kieślowski effortlessly weaves everything together- very fitting for a film about making connections. An opening scene is often a film’s first shot at conveying its main themes and ideas. Here, the camera follows a telephone wire from a living room all the way to the ocean and beyond, but suddenly the line gets disconnected. Without uttering a single word of dialogue, Kieślowski establishes that the film is also about the failure to make connections.
We witness Valentine (Irene Jacob) as she forms a new bond with a dog and his owner, an old retired judge played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. As she’s making these intimate connections, she’s also failing to connect with her controlling boyfriend in England. Things start getting interesting when we follow a parallel storyline of another judge whose life echoes that of the older judge. We quickly get the sense that a force larger than life is at play, and everything in life is linked somehow. The only things disrupting our interconnected lives are time and space.
The retired judge eavesdrops on people through the telephone. The act itself has taught him to stop judging people based on the limited facts that he knows of them. When the news of his eavesdropping breaks out, an angry neighbor throws a rock through his window. It doesn’t seem to bother the old man. In fact, he tells Valentine that if he was in the neighbor’s place, he would do the same thing. “Of course. And that goes for everyone I judged. Given their lives, I would steal, I’d kill, I’d lie. Of course, I would…all that because I wasn’t in their shoes, but mine.”
The film invites viewers to consider what others have been through before passing judgment on them. At its core, “Red” is about the need to come together and share experiences. It left me with the urge to be more understanding and compassionate towards others. However, the film’s most impressive feat is its metaphysical connection with the medium itself, the cinema, which is also about coming together and sharing experiences.
The Cinephile Fix 