Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

March 21, 2003

So you've worked all your life, struggling to assert the deepest depths of your soul, spent decades rehearsing that Oscar speech. You say you're against the war, but you want that little gold man. Is it a moral choice not to attend? To hope to win in order to make a speech? To accept in silence? Nikki Finke's piece in LA Weekly is a brisk and acerbic take on the situation certain talents and certain egos will find themselves in on Sunday: "As they said during the Vietnam era, 'What if they gave a war and nobody came?' So think of the significance, with this insoluble invasion of Iraq coinciding with the insipid Oscars, if they gave the biggest awards show in the world and nobodies came."

Rouge faced

Most films make the unspoken assumption that their characters are defined by and limited to their plots," Roger Ebert writes in his The Great Movies column of Krzysztof Kieslowski's final masterpiece, Red. "Stories are about lives. That is the difference between films for children and films for adults. Kieslowski celebrates intersecting timelines and lifelines, choices made and unmade. All his films ask why, since God gave us free will, movie directors go to such trouble to take it away." And television news directors, I was thinking as well, listening to the alternately reductionist and combative verbiage on news reports of the first two days of war in Iraq.

Red is out now in a surprisingly affordable three DVD collection with Blue and White.  It's essentially the same version as has been out in France for a while and coveted by Kieslowski admirers. (I got the set for an affordable $35; it's likely available for less.) Turning to a masterwork like Red isn't an escape from manufactured realities, it's to reestablish one's own esthetics in the face of relentless jabber.

Red opens at a tear, camera rushing from the telephone of a beautiful, somber woman along phone lines from the middle of Switzerland, across Europe, into the ocean, through fiber optics to another phone in England, only to encounter a busy signal-shown as a flashing red light in the phone exchange. Irene Jacob hangs up and sulks. It's a fleet, jokey moment: an opening that hurtles toward making elemental connections, only to be rebuffed by the machinery that supposedly permits and even enhances communication.

In his last decade, Kieslowski made two projects-the ten-film Decalogue (out later this spring in an enhanced edition from Facets Video) and the "Three Colors" trilogy-that, at first shallow glance, might suggest hubris and European art-film pretension of the worst kind. The Decalogue, set amongst the tenants of a gloomy Polish housing estate, is derived, however obliquely, from the Ten Commandments, and Blue, White and Red match the French tricolor flag, and the virtues ascribed to each: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Kieslowski slyly uses his overweening "themes" as a way to minimize the suffocating structure of traditional plots and to instead dive into things that actually delight him: patterns of chance, the paths of our lives, enigmatic expressions on fascinating faces, the way contemporary life is transacted in modern cities, all observed with a mildly sarcastic shrug. The result is hypnotic and sensual, a fragrant montage of mood and image unlike that of any other filmmaker working in the past thirty years.

Kieslowski's interpretation of Fraternity propels Valentine, a young model (Jacob, from Kieslowski's Double Life of Veronique), Auguste, taking his last exams to become a lawyer (Jean-Pierre Lorit), and Kern, a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) into the deceptive calm of a quiet suburb of Arial. Auguste lives near Valentine, but does not meet her. Still, he smiles at her car alarm, catches a flash of her assured gait and sturdy calf as she ducks into a nearby cafe. (We watch them not catching sight of each other on several occasions.) One rainy night, after a cold phone call from her unseen, long-distance boyfriend in London, Valentine's red car hits a dog belonging to Kern, and finding his address on the dog's collar, returns it to him. But he's lost interest in the outside world, except in the telephone calls of his neighbors, neighbors whose histories, whose infidelities and secrets he eavesdrops upon with a clinical disinterest. (Kieslowski shows everyday life as the ultimate tragedy, reduced to the cruel artlessness of overheard conversation.)

It's the same tack Kieslowski takes in teasing out the meaning of his collection of red objects, of missed meanings, of eccentric repetitions. Simultaneity takes the place of routine plot developments. Red feels like, well, life: Is the modern age Dickensian or Barthesian? Composed of strands of plot or shards of semiotics? Kieslowski's virtuosity lies in his ability to bury these notions in the flow of faces, motions, gestures, mysterious acts. It's a smart film, a worthy descendant of the intellectual cinema of filmmakers like Bresson and Antonioni, rigorous, cool, yet highly erotic in the contemplation of surfaces that must somehow reveal inner lives, innermost thoughts.

But Red works without strenuous contemplation. The symbolism of Trintignant's splendidly weary and bitter judge is obviousness itself-like God, like a film director playing puppetmaster of his characters-but Kieslowski himself is singularly adept at coloring what seems at first glance merely transparent. Stray shots of objects, eccentric framings, scraps of distant sound that accumulate meanings and symmetries as the film progresses, accumulate in suggestive ways the meanings of which remain elusive, much in the way any of us could view daily life if only we had the time, if only we had Kieslowski's wry skepticism and gifted eye.

Although the "Three Colors" films overlap in modest ways, Red stands head and shoulders above the others. Kieslowski and his customary collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz array the interstices of modern urban life in a way that might seem mystical, divined, or fated. Kieslowski has quoted a Polish poet in interviews: "But every beginning is only a continuation and the book of fate is always open in the middle." Kieslowski's work, like that of his countryman Stanislaw Lem, has often explored that theme, but Red is taken over by the criss-crossing of his characters. Where Blue had Juliette Binoche's presence to invigorate its languid story, and White was a mean-spirited, quirkily Polish farce, Red resists its symbolic meanings with the sheer force of its gorgeous, slippery imagery.

Attentive sound design and Zbigniew Priesner's compelling, bolero-based score are ideal complements to Piotr Sobocinski's silken cinematography. While blue and white figure into the visual schemes of the earlier pair of films, the last of the trilogy (which Kieslowski said would be his last film, although he began writing another trilogy) is crazed with red: Valentine's name; an empty red billboard frame, later to be filled with an immense representation of her face, selling "Hollywood"; dog's blood on her fingers as she traces a route on a map veined with red highways; an oversized Swiss Army knife pinwheeling in a shop window; three cherries in a row on a slot machine; a point-of-view shot rolling down a red bowling alley's lane toward a bright red bowling ball. It all sounds chicly ridiculous, a gagman's notion of abstraction, but the cumulative effect is breathtaking. In a cool red town, people live in isolation, almost meeting, meeting, never meeting. Life is lived, transactions transacted, emotions, unspent, left to wither within potentially generous hearts. Kieslowski alternates precision and ambiguity: an oxymoron in description, but ineffably moving on screen. After the first time I saw Red, I wanted to go a month before going to a theater again.

The extras on the three discs include four of Kieslowski's student films, audio commentaries by Annette Insdorf, who's written the one major book on Kieslowski in English,  interviews with his leading actresses, producer Marin Karmitz, and several master classes wherein the late, great director describes his methods and concerns in plain, straightforward language. To stoop to the overused cliche about DVDs: here's the true film school in a box.

Don't Cry For Me

I'll write about several more DVDs in coming weeks, including Wim Wenders' The American Friend, a moody anti-thriller that's long been one of my favorites, out on DVD for the first time, as well as Criterion's issues of The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum, Robert Bresson's Les dames du Bois de Boulogne and My Life as a Dog. I'll likely get around sooner to reporting on FilmExchange, the all-Canadian film festival I just attended at Winnipeg, a long weekend spent indoors to avoid forty below weather, and in April, world willing, a regular diary (with photos) from the Fifth Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival. Argentina in the autumn... Muy Buenos.

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