Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 307: Mon Nov 7

Three Colours Trilogy (Kieślowski, 1993-94): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This is a 35mm presentation.

Guardian review (extract):
The
Krzysztof Kieślowski films that meake up the trilogy are Three Colours: Blue (1993), Three Colours: White (1994) and Three Colours: Red (1994), notionally colour-schemed in the manner of the French flag, and – again, notionally – structured around the classic themes of the French republic: liberty, equality and brotherhood. With a little effort, the relevance of each can be detected in each film, but as Kieslowski himself cheerfully conceded, these concepts were there because the production funding was French. The real themes of the trilogy are more disparate, more chaotic, less high-minded, and far more interesting: the unending torture of love, the inevitability of deceit, the fascination of voyeurism and the awful potency of men's fear and loathing of women. To throw everything away, including one's very identity, and start again – that is another powerful, recurrent motif.

They are about entirely different people in different cities, though there are little overlapping, disorientating touches in which the leading character of one film is glimpsed in cameo in another, a technique which effectively points up the artifice of everything that is being presented on screen. (Lucas Belvaux's Trilogy (2002) was similar, but the Venn-diagram overlaps were much closer, and the three films more intimately interconnected.)

What on earth have these people and these stories got to do with each other? At first glance, the final moments of Three Colours: Red would seem to provide an explanation to be applied retrospectively in a backstory "twist", making the Three Colours comparable to Michael Haneke's 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) or indeed Emilio Estevez's Bobby (2006), about the assassination of Robert Kennedy. But at second or third glance, those final moments – that shivering parade of bewildered people on a lifeboat – are quite as perplexing as everything else.
Peter Bradshaw (you can read the full review here)

Here (and above) is the trailer.

No comments: