Ever since making Dekalog in 1989, the monumental ten-hour-long Polish-language TV series consisting of one-hour episodes based on each of the Bible’s Ten Commandments, director Krzysztof Kieślowski has achieved something that only the Russian formalist Dziga Vertov did with his epochal film Man with a Movie Camera 60 odd-years ago — the superhuman ability to create magic from reality. Vertov’s “formal experiment” of a film declared its intentions to do so right from the get-go: its belief in the power of the “kinoeye” (overtly stated in the film’s opening credits that double as Vertov’s cinematic manifesto) and the Kuleshov Effect implied that the raw materials of reality — close-ups of a working-class person’s face, POV shots of a derelict doll, the rhythmic montage of industrial automation — were in and of themselves possessed with meaning-defining possibilities. All that was required to see — or better still, sense — this magic was a cameraperson’s keen eye and an editor’s keener-to-experiment hands.
Kieślowski’s objective with Dekalog may not have been to foreground such cinematic experimentation. (The director’s 1985 film Blind Chance is more overt with that quality; it employs a game-like branching narrative structure that disrupts classical narrative form). But such is his overwhelming belief in the power of seemingly mundane imagery to communicate something that goes beyond whatever rationality is binding his characters that it gains an unusually naturalistic (and, hence, all the more enigmatically moving) symbolic force. Take, for instance, any of these images: the sudden spilling of milk in Dekalog: Six, the shattering of glass in Dekalog: Four, or the green glare of a computer screen in Dekalog: One. Each of them is representative of something or the other: slippery but seductive teenage eroticism in Six, a troublingly boundary-breaking incestuous father-daughter relationship in Four, and the cold rationality of science in One. But none of them feels designed to deduce each of the episode’s moral or meaning. Those qualities seem to exist outside the narrative as raw materials of reality that, by sheer coincidence, seem to have found their way into the film. Taken this way, they’re the series’ destabilizing presences: a reminder of something — an otherworldly presence, a mystical or metaphysical connection — existing beyond the Commandment’s strictly established morals and meanings.The Three Colors Trilogy (1993-94), often regarded as the crowning achievement of Kieślowski’s career, is, in many ways, a remarkable — if somewhat declaratively operatic, and, especially in the case of the first two films in the trilogy, uneven — continuation of this sensibility. Its status as an international co-production between France, Poland, and Switzerland starring then-up-and-coming French stars like Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, and Irène Jacob may suggest otherwise. But its governing ethos — of a filmmaker trying to evoke the transcendental within the realm of the concretely real — follows, without compromise, from Dekalog. Gone, of course, are the Biblical bonds of the Commandments that made increasingly less sense in the face of Poland’s crippling political uncertainty in the 1990s; instead, what we have here are three films that correspond or respond to the three political ideals of the French republic — liberty, equality, and fraternity — each represented by one of the three colors — Blue, White, and Red — of the French National Flag. Kieślowski, giving an interview to the Oxford student press post-retirement, on a day he seemingly woke up on the wrong side of his bed, has downplayed the significance of choosing these colors as his films’ titles: “The words [liberte, egalite, fraternite] are French because the money is French. If the money had been of a different nationality, we would have titled the films differently, or they might have had a different cultural connotation.” Understandably, this bluntly indifferent attitude toward institutional symbols has encouraged critics and audiences to see these films as mere provocative perversions of these foundational ideals: Roger Ebert’s otherwise illuminating essay on the trilogy features an oft-quoted line — “Blue is the “anti-tragedy,” White is the “anti-comedy,” and Red is the “anti-romance” — that negates its magical, at times contradictory, allure.
But whoever has fallen under the spell of these films knows that labeling them as anti-anything is doing them a disservice. This is especially true of Red, the trilogy’s and Kieślowski’s final film, brimming with infinite possibilities — not only of romance, but also of seemingly impossible fraternal connections. Every careening camera movement, burst of Zbigniew Preisner’s haunting background score, and instance of narrative doubling feels like a destabilizing presence here — a gentle nudge by film and filmmaker to its characters to look more carefully, to sense potential romantic connections floating in and around them. But, crucially, as also been noted by Ebert in the same essay in which he labels Red as “anti-romantic,” Kieślowski never “preaches this lesson” to us or his characters. He simply “tells a parable” about connections that exist. It’s up to us, then, to interpret them as manipulatively forged or miraculously formed.
In other words, it’s entirely possible to see Red as a “disgusting” anti-romance devoid of the magic repeatedly suggested by Kieślowski’s filmmaking. The narrative in this, let’s say, strictly realist interpretation of the film is entirely orchestrated by The Judge (the magnetically enigmatic Jean-Louis Trintignant), a God-like figure who, for nothing other than selfish reasons, forges a connection between two souls — Valentine (the luminous Irène Jacob) and Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit), struggling to maintain their respective relationships while studying in Geneva. He doesn’t believe in their ability to find a genuine connection. So, he uses surveillance (he calls it “eavesdropping”) to acquire information about their lonely lives before forcefully bringing them together. Why them, specifically? Because Auguste is essentially a younger version of The Judge: a law student left heartbroken after discovering that his girlfriend is having an affair with another man. And Valentine, in his own words, is “innocent” — a somewhat idealized version of the woman he loved, incapable of cheating on her partner (Kieślowski shows this in a sequence where she coyly rejects the romantic advances of a photographer). This “perfect” union allows the Judge to (vicariously?) live the romantic life he never got a chance to live; in other words, his connection to living again comes only by manipulating other people and their potential romantic connections.
Kieślowski’s rapturous filmmaking, however, consistently undermines any “anti-romantic” interpretation of Red. Even before we meet The Judge, the director establishes a mysterious connection between Valentine and Auguste through unforgettable formal gymnastics. See, for instance, the sharp contrast he draws between the film’s rhapsodic opening montage, chronicling the whirlwind “journey” that Valentine’s long-distance boyfriend’s phone call has to make to reach her and the natural connection formed between Auguste and Valentine through a fluid tracking shot. The director utilizes Piotr Sobociński’s time-lapse cinematography to convey the former’s uncontrollable desire for connection, with the camera tearing through networks of tunnels, canals, and cables to try and reach Valentine’s telephone line. But rather than showing her picking up the phone, the film cuts to her telephone line beeping, left unattended. No such effort is required nor expectation thrust upon in the subsequent sequence that shows the “meeting” between Auguste and Valentine: it flows naturally from Sobociński’s camera tracking Auguste leaving his apartment to, then, craning up to enter Valentine’s apartment from her open window. This isn’t a connection staged by The Judge, then: it’s forged so splendidly by Kieślowski that it feels naturally formed.
Red is replete with such transcendental flourishes of filmmaking — whereby the camera lingers on or pans toward common spaces shared by the two lovers unknowingly at the same or different points in time — that, with added support from Preisner’s exhilarating orchestral score, makes the overall film feel like the most swooning romance between The Judge (as Auguste) and Valentine. The former isn’t an all-knowing God-like figure here who controls everything; he’s a mere mortal gradually made to realize — through the magic Kieślowski’s “kino eye” — what it feels like to see and sense magical connections floating around him.
It’s telling, however, that with every rewatch, what stands out more and more in Red is how much Kieślowski resists providing match cuts that concretely and coherently connect these disparate elements. Every moment of ostentatious camera movement that flaunts the medium’s ability to create magic still feels like an aberration in a sequence that otherwise frames its characters trapped inside frame-within-frame compositions; every jolt of non-diegetic background score only makes us realize how much silence otherwise dominates the scene; every character connection felt is — up until the very end — never exactly realized. Kieślowski’s magic trick in Red, then, is not to simply make a magical film about true romance and lasting connections; it’s to masterfully evoke the possibility of it in a reality that otherwise feels cripplingly anti-romantic.
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