Films: A Short Film About Killing, A Short Film About Love (both 1988), The
Double Life of Veronique (1991), Three Colours Blue (1993), Three Colours White,
Three Colours Red (both 1994).
Starting on 17 February, and running for six successive Sundays, the Barbican’s
Krzysztof Kieslowski retrospective features the films that cemented his
international reputation after Dekalog, originally made for Polish television, had
wowed the festival circuit in 1988. All these works are meditative, often
melancholic in tone, expressionist in technique, and tackle themes of identity,
and what is means to be at once connected and isolated. If they are also the
highbrow equivalent of high concept (the Short Films drawn from the ten
commandments, the Three Colours trilogy based on French revolutionary ideals),
this approach mainly serves mainly to structure rather than restrict Kieslowski’s
ideas.
Before Dekalog, Kieslowski had been first a documentary maker, then a
politically-minded feature director in his native Poland: he was also an admirer of
both Ken Loach and Ingmar Bergman, which helps point you in the direction of
his sensibilities. If the six films in the retrospective are all from the later, more
esoteric phase of his career, they do have a strong personal vision all their own.
From the Dekalog series, Kieslowski and his government financiers chose A Short
Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love (both 1988) to adapt into feature
form. The stereotypical Western view of 80s Eastern Europe (alienated populace,
anonymous apartment blocks, post-industrial wasteland, and dank weather) is
represented in these gritty adaptations (and in fact in all 10 films that made up
Dekalog), and harks back to the themes and tones of his earlier work.
By the time of the Three Colours trilogy a few years later, however, we are in the
heady world of French country houses, retired judges, composers and fashion
models, though the two worlds are spliced in Three Colours White (1994), which
fluctuates between Julie Delpy’s apparently affluent Parisian lifestyle, and her ex-husband Zbigniew Zamakovski’s squalid existence in his native Poland – “home at
last” he says as he is turfed out of a fellow traveller’s trunk onto a rubbish tip by
disappointed luggage-jackers.
If Kieslowski is making a political point about the relationship between Poland and
France, East and West at a time of great change, it doesn’t get in the way of the
human drama being played out between Zamakovski’s impotent, slightly clownish
Karol and Delpy’s intolerant, taunting Dominique. By the time Karol has, by shady
means, taken on the trappings of the entrepreneur in the new market economy,
he has regained his potency all the better to get “equal” with Dominique (the film
represents an interpretation of the concept of equality in the liberty, equality and
fraternity triptych).
Of the Three Colours trilogy, White is the one most driven by story and social
realities, and in this it has more in common with the two Short films than its Blue and Red companions; is Western Europe more abstract, less concrete in
Kieslowski’s eyes? Or did he simply become more interested in the internal life of
his characters’ later in his career? The Double Life of Veronique (1991) was the
first Kieslowski film to be set largely in France, and is the most intangible of all
the films in the retrospective. Here, the connection between two identical women
(both played by Irene Jacob), who never meet, is dreamy and mysterious, and
based almost exclusively on intuition. The borders between the rational and the
inexplicable are also crossed in the exclusively French Three Colours Blue (1993)
and Three Colours Red (1994), but less so in White, which is anchored in the
wintry machinations of revenge.
Still, the single-mindedness with which Karol pursues his bittersweet retribution
in White is of a piece with the often compulsive and perverse nature of many of
the men in Kieslowski’s world. The 19 year-old Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko) peeping
in at the glamorous older woman opposite in Love is a cousin to the Judge (Jean-
Louis Trintignant) eavesdropping indiscriminately on his neighbours in Red (both
claim to want “nothing”); and Karol in White may not literally break the “thou
shall not kill” commandment, but his actions are, in their way, as shocking as
those of Lazar (Miroslaw Baka) in Killing.
Like Kieslowski’s men, his women characters are often isolated, yet they find
creative, often quietly mystical ways to make connections in the most
unpromising of circumstances. The spied-upon Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska) in
Love, the grief-stricken Julie Vignon (Juliette Binoche) in Blue, both find ways of
coming to terms with situations not of their making (though Kieslowski might
have made fewer films if his characters remembered to close their curtains
occasionally). This passivity is taken to extremes with the French Veronique, who
literally becomes a marionette in the hands of a (male) manipulator; whether this
largely polarised portrayal of men and women is visionary or merely patronising
is probably in the eye of the beholder.
The films in the retrospective span a period of only six years, yet Killing, with its
grinding pessimism and forensic attention to detail, and Red, with its fragile
optimism and spontaneous compassion, may seem worlds apart at first glance.
Yet there are numerous common threads in these films, and one of the strongest
is the role of fate. From Lazar dropping rocks from a traffic bridge in Killing, to
the chance meetings and non-meetings that shape the characters lives in Red,
the butterfly effect is fully engaged. And Kieslowski’s use of stunning
cinematography, expressionist colour and stirring music create a world all their
own. The grimy, brackish hues used in Killing give a nightmarish, fairy-tale
quality to the squalid proceedings; elsewhere, the use of blue in Three Colours
Blue suffuses each frame with an air of melancholy, whilst white and red are used
with wintry and warming effect respectively.
If this use of colour helps portray the interior world of the characters, the lush
music of Kieslowski’s regular composer Zbigniew Preisner is equally important in
setting the mood, even if his scores are sometimes too self-consciously artful to
work subliminally. And Jacques Witta’s editing of Veronique, Blue and Red helps
create the mesmerising rhythms of these films, with short, almost montage-like
scenes interspersed with long, languid sequences through which the characters
move as if underwater (literally, in Blue, where Juliette Binoche has several
scenes in a swimming pool).
In fact, this editing style seems to reflect Kieslowski’s own career path, at least in
relation to these later works. The ten films of Dekalog were shot within the space
of a year, and at one point he was editing Blue, filming White, and writing Red all
at the same time. Yet in the five years between the Short films and the Three
Colours trilogy, he made only one film (Veronique), and then retired altogether
after completing Red. He died in 1996. This season of films shows the range of
what he could do: from dark humour to melancholy, from films driven by
narrative to those where chance and the irrational lead to compelling meditations
on what Kieslowski called the “secret zones in each individual”.
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