Movies: The Official "Movie of the Week" Club Thread IV

[Jevo]

My general belief is that many of the same problems expressed about media today, particularly on issues of bias or interest or sensationalism, have always been present in media and have been complaints/concerns from the public probably since the first newspaper ever existed. We just have an infinitely greater volume of media and information today. But issues (real or perceived) haven’t really changed much.

I feel this section also applies to a film like Network. It feels prophetic now if you watch it for the first time. But was it prophetic or just putting some very real and contemporary criticisms of the state of TV news on display?

 

[Jevo]

Three Colors: Red (1994) dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski

Valentine is a young model living in Geneva. She has a boyfriend who lives in London, who seems to at the same time not care about her, but is also very possessive of her. One day while driving she hits a dog named Rita. She takes Rita to her owner Joseph Kern, who doesn't show much concern. Valentine ends up taking the dog to vet, and takes it home with her. A few days later Rita escapes and runs to back to Joseph. When Irene finds her, she learns that Joseph have been listening in on his neighbours conversations for years, learning all their secrets. Valentine is appaled but also intrigued about Joseph. While she threatens to reveal what he has done, she can't bring herself to do it. The two end up developing a friendship despite their many differences. In the background Irene's neighbour Antoine have quietly been living the life of Joseph with a 30 year delay.

Both Joseph and Valentine are lonely people. Joseph knows it, and uses his spying to get connected to people, although he doesn't seem interested in real connections with his neighbours. Valentine doesn't know it. She has a long distance boyfriend, but it seems like a one-sided relationship, where she lusts for him, but he doesn't for her. Without her boyfriend she doesn't appear to have any close relations. They find something in each other that they didn't know they were missing. It makes Joseph give up his spying and he turns himself into the police and tells his neighbours about what he has done. Valentine slowly starts to realise that she is loveable, and deserves better than what her boyfriend is giving her. But she still decides to go to London to see him at the end of the film. Platonic love like we see between Valentine and Joseph is rarely portrayed as beautifully in film as it is here. Irene Jacog and Jean-Louis Trintignant are both very good, and have a very good chemistry. They make very compelling friendship.

One of the most standout things about Red is the cinematography. Red is (obviously) a theme and almost constant presence in the film. Nothing about how Red is filmed is done by routine. Every colour, every angle, every composition has been conciously been picked, and nothing is done as you usually would. It makes for a very engaging viewing, and the cinematography tells as much of the story as the rest of the film.

Red is probably my favourite movie out of Three Colours movies. But I think my answer usually depends on whether or not Red or Blue is the most recent movie of the two that I have watched. They are both masterpieces in my opinion.

 

[KallioWeHardlyKnewYe]

Red
Kieslowski (1994)
“Would you smile for me?”

It’s funny how little the idea presented here – fraternity – is ever presented in film, especially in a pairing such as this. It’s not that it’s never done, but with so much film made by men and often older men it feels like a story like this ultimately has romantic tendrils, which this does not, at least not overtly. Movies are often about that more base bond – love or lust – and not a simple matter of human understanding. (Though this does wind up in a place with a parallel love story).

Basic human goodness isn't really a selling point for the poster.

Fate brings the model Valentine and the retire judge cum with a penchant for eavesdropping on his neighbors. She accidentally hit his dog. He doesn’t seem to care much though he does offer her too much money for the vet bill. She learns of his spying on his neighbors. Her disgust (and her base, human compassion) at his actions prompts him to confess, a revelation that sends him to court. She won’t rat on him, which is part of what fuels his decision. Meanwhile in the background is Auguste, the eventual judge in Kern’s case who is navigating choppy romantic waters of his own. The bond between Valentine and Kern drives her to want more for himself and him to right his wrongs. These paths all converge first at the court and then in an ill-fated boat trip across the English Channel where Valentine and Auguste are among the survivors (as are the leads of the previous two movies in the trilogy). Kern, relieved that she lived, smiles.

As with the previous two movies, Kieslowski nails not just the theme, but also the visual match to it with color and composition. Also, as with the previous two movies, there are just dynamite performances here with both Irene Jacob and Jean-Louis Tritintignat bringing the slightest shading to their characters that make them feel human and not just a type. I’m plagued by making this sort of hypothetical comparison but it’s easy to image an American version where Valentine is made a much more stereotypical model and Kern a much sterner judge.

And then, that Kieslowski gives us brief addendums to Blue and White as well is a bonus almost akin to the kiss in Wong-Kar Wai’s 2046. Art house MCU that makes you smile and point at the screen.

This was Kieslowski’s last film. I can think of few filmmakers who have ever departed on such a strong note.

 

[kihei]

Three Colors: Red (1994) Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Three Colors: Red is the final film in a trilogy. While many critics, among them the late Roger Ebert, rate Kieslowski's work as one of the most important trilogies in film history, it is questionable Ebert could have gotten Kieslowski to agree. While much has been made about the relationship between the title, the French flag and, specifically, the themes embodied in the country's national motto of liberte, egalitie and fraternitie, Kieslowski is on record as saying that France just picked up the tab. If it had been another country, say Germany, it would have been a different flag, though he thought the movies he made would likely be pretty much the same.

Regardless of that, Red rounds off the trilogy with a tale of fraternite, focusing on platonic love between a young good-hearted French woman named Valentine (Irene Jacob) and Joseph, a gnarly old codger (Jean Louis Trintignant), who has basically retreated to his domicile from which he views the world's struggles with a jaundiced eye. Another thing Ebert said was he thought the three movies represented respectively an anti-tragedy, an anti-comedy and an anti-romance. Think he is onto something there as there is another dimension to the film beyond the literal that seems to float just above the surface like a vague mist, more about which later. If the movie relationship to fraternite seems tenuous, well, that is the way Kieslowski usually likes to play things. His great masterpiece The Decalogue is made up of ten films, one for each of the Ten Commandments. The relationship between the specific film and the accompanying commandment is sometimes so vague as to be almost non-existent....that is, until you think about it for awhile, usually a long while, and then suddenly little connections start appearing.

So basically what is going on in this film? There is a density to the themes of the movie that seems to transcend most of the story telling. As in another of the director's great masterpieces, The Double Life of Veronique (which stars an eerily similar Irene Jacob), Red seems much, much greater than the mere sum of its parts. In the earlier film, Kieslowski somehow got at feelings that could not be put into words, that only a visual medium could communicate. Here a different, though just as subtle, game could be at play, one more symbolic than ethereal. Kieslowski could just be having fun with God here--an insight not original to me that I stumbled upon reading academic criticism of the film years ago. Sounds far-fetched but I like the idea if only because it reveals a dimension of humour that is otherwise not immediately evident in Red.

To start with, one of Kieslowski overwhelming preoccupations in his films is the role of fate or chance in people's lives. This concern pervades almost all of his works, much the way the silence of God haunts Ingmar Bergman's mid-career films. In Kieslowski's case, so much is determined by things we have no control over and can't foresee. Enter Valentine with her career as a model, her jealous boyfriend, her problematic relationship with family members, and her general sense of feeling just a little worn down by her cares. By chance she hits a dog and begins a relationship with the dog's owner, a retired judge named Joseph who seems reclusive and bitter. He doesn't even want his dog back. As the movie progresses and Valentine and Joseph's relationship develops, Joseph displays in a ramshackle and rather witty way some god-like powers. For one thing he is not dead, but he seems to have rejected the world almost entirely (if we have rejected God, perhaps God has rejected us--too much trouble). His powers include, well, being a judge, but also knowing people's thoughts (he taps phones), predicting people's future (Valentine will have a happy life with a man beside her whom she will love), having a hot line that provides him with the weather throughout Europe before anyone else, and the kind of almost whimsical curiosity to figuratively stick his finger in a socket to see what results from such a impetuous, almost random act (he deliberately confesses his crime to his neighbour and the police seemingly out of curiosity to find out what happens next or maybe it is just to stay in tough with Valentine). In the movie's cleverest piece of slight of hand, he also would seem to literally make his dream about Valentine comes true, as what seems like an inconsequential subplot turns out to be a miracle thirty years removed from Joseph's actual experience. In a darkly funny and fateful move, he may also have saved only characters who appear in the trilogy from drowning while a thousand or more people perish in a tragic and fateful ferry sinking.

So if Joseph is a sort of decrepit, not really into it anymore, god figure who is as subject to fate as the rest of us, what does Valentine represent? The best I can come up with is goodness, something Joseph may have not seen in a long time. She is a kind and vulnerable human being and fate may prevent her from getting what she deserves, might keep her from happiness. Fate here is the ultimate trickster, the ultimate wild card, something that might be out of control and depressing even to a god. As she was in The Double Life of Veronique, Jacob is perfect not because she is a great actress (think of Juliette Binoche in this role; doesn't work, too much of Valentine would be transparent), but because she is a great physical presence, beautiful sure, but with a doe-in-the-headlights quality, a fragility that makes her seem a poor match for fate's crueller jokes. Jacob's ability to be opaque but compelling seems to me just like the kind of woman God might be interested in. And take an interest Joseph certainly does, especially as he realizes his attraction does have limits, self-imposed or otherwise (fate, again). (It is also fun to watch the power shifts in this movie as people seldom speak to one another on the same level, one is either above or below the other--just one of endless masterful cinematic touches). I may be wrong about what is going on, but concede me this: it takes a great director to play the kind of games Kieslowsk plays with the medium. Maybe in his last film he is just letting us know that in movies, the director is God.