Three Colors: Blue, White, Red

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s marvelous trilogy provided a worthy capstone to his three-decade career as a leader in European cinema. He retired after finishing Red, and died two years later. Similar to his Decalogue series reinterpreting the Ten Commandments, Three Colors is nominally a loose exploration of the Revolutionary slogan of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Kieslowski himself downplayed this in later interviews, saying he merely wanted to tell stories about people, but that he could get financing from across all of Europe if investors were given the hard sell on the trilogy as noble ideological artifact. And it’s true that each movie can be seen separately, as three unconnected love stories, without becoming incomprehensible. (Juliette Binoche’s powerfully understated performance in Blue is surely worth singling out.) Still, the thematic connections are there, and trying to make them is a good part of the trilogy’s fun. Liberty intertwines with grief, equality with revenge, fraternity with loneliness, and all connect with Kieslowski’s overarching interest in how random caprice shapes our lives.