Update, 11/10: For the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, "there is a definite touch of dinner-party trendiness that clings to the memory of these movies now, together with a touch of critical doubt, a suspicion that the Three Colors were contrived, over-determined, self-conscious and slow. When the third of these films, Three Colors: Red, was beaten for the Palme D'Or at the 1994 Cannes film festival by Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, it was a real market correction for a certain type of high arthouse cinema. Well, the bygone hype that once surrounded the Three Colors may have dated. But watched again sympathetically, the movies themselves stand up, not as the dreamy conversation-pieces of a thousand studenty parties – with blokes pretending to like them to impress their dates – but as an operatic triptych, a dramatic cine-poem of intense strangeness, indulgent and confident, set somewhere which looks like the real world, but isn't."
The late Krzysztof Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs series is to be released on DVD and Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection this Tuesday, the 15th. I remember when these movies had their cinematic releases in the nineteen nineties. If memory serves correctly, White and Red were the ones I saw in the cinema. Memory struggles to see if I saw them in any particular order, but perhaps that is irrelevant.
I struggled with Blue the first time I saw it. It took a second viewing for me to truly appreciate not just the story but the artifice in the telling. David Hudson refers to Derek Malcolm's review of White in The Guardian. Malcolm writes how it is "less stylish" than Blue or Red with which I would agree. Perhaps it is Malcolm's assessment that White feels "truer" that got me to appreciate it - but less than Red.
What I loved about Red outside of the stylistic is the growing relationship between the young student/model, Irene Jacob and the elderly retired judge, Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Isolation, loneliness, a pessimistic optimism (or optimistic pessimism) and transformation all featured in Kieslowski's trilogy. And yes, to some, these films may have been perceived as contrived. But also, yes, we can now re-view these beyond the hype and see that they have stood the test of time as haunting dramatic sections of a poem set to beautiful music.
Read the rest of David Hudson's piece, here
