Rent Three Colours: Red (1994)

The Last Great Film. - Three Colours: Red review by Steve

Krzysztof Kieslowski teamed up again with Irene Jacob for the last of his trilogy on the themes of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Here she appears with a star of the French New Wave, Jean-Louis Trintignant, a retired judge with a streak of megalomania, who listens in to the telephone conversations (this is pre-internet...) of his neighbours, whose miseries and tawdry misdemeanours serve to disillusion his last few years.

The film is about the interconnectedness of people which allows Kieslowski (and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz) to poetically impress on us various abstract themes through music, montage, the repetition of imagery, colour... The director's art. It is exquisite and transforming with Jacob most beautiful and sympathetic in the lead role.

I've often felt that this was the last great film ever made. Which of course isn't true, though it gives an idea of how much I love it. But if cinema really is in a terminal decline, then this may well serve as a late example of how transformative was once its power. Kieslowski communicates things that are difficult to say, and conveys them with purity and simplicity.

A rich Red - Three Colours: Red review by CP Customer

Apparently slow-paced, 'Red' actually takes very little time to build a tableau that challenges the tidy little world of Valentine (Irene Jacob) and raises questions about what it is to play at God, or make connections with our fellow human. I was slow to realise how the plots were going to interlace: I don't want to give the ending away, so I'll just say that an apparently disconnected subplot turns out to be very much connected in a melodramatic, but emotionally rewarding, manner. Throughout, there are amusing allusions to the wider Blue/White/Red trilogy. The only negative: perhaps the red theme is visually overdone? But this is a quibble for a movie that will undoubted go on rewarding with repeated viewings. My favourite of the trilogy is undoubtedly Blue, with Red a close second.

More Ennui than Ah Oui - Three Colours: Red review by CP Customer

Slow and dull. If this is the masterpiece I'm glad we haven't had the other two yet. The plot plods along with unbearably implausible conversations and you just can't begin to like the characters or find anything engaging about them. We gave up after an hour as we just couldn't bring ourselves to care what happened in the rest of the film. We do like World Cinema but this doesn't match films such as Delicatessen or Motorcycle Diaries.