Three Colors: Red

1994 final movie in a trilogy and a dude's career

Rating: 19/20

Plot: A bubblegum model befriends a retired judge who has a filthy little secret hobby.

This final film of the trilogy is focused on fraternity, but there's a lot in this about chance, too. Allusions to coin flips and slot machines mix right in with discussions about characters being born at wrong times, something that as far as I know can't be controlled. This movie also has a lot of telephones, almost as many as Bresson's got doors in L'Argent. In fact, the film opens with a unexpected, surprisingly flashy journey along a telephone line to a phone that, if I'm remembering right, isn't answered. Of the three films, this one might be the flashiest actually. There aren't special effects, but the camera's movements have a way of making the viewer swoon, and there are all kinds of cleverly choreographed shots of these characters and what's going on in the backgrounds with these characters. One shot in which a car arrives and nearly runs into a camera that then rises up to peek into a character's apartment with a ringing telephone and then back down to show another character doing something before following another character into an apartment was one of many that just force you to pay close attention to see the ways these characters are connected.

You really have to pay attention to movies anyway, but this is a special case. There are so many clues in the seams.

Irene Jacob, who also starred in Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique, is perfect here, and the great Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a judge, one of the more interesting characters I've seen in a movie in a long time. He plays this judge as a fragile and omniscient guy who may or may not enjoy owning a dog.

The way Kieslowski brings all the characters from the trilogy together in a climactic event at the end of this one might seem a little dopey, but it has an impact and even changes the ending of one of those movies. And a final shot, a callback to another shot, brought a tear to my eye, not because of anything emotional that was going on but just because it was a powerful punctuation point on a really powerful work of art.

A note: I saw these movies in the mid-90's when I was a just becoming a little more serious about movies. I didn't remember all the particulars of this movie, but of the three, it had the images that stuck in my mind the most.