Three Colors: Red [Trois Couleurs: Rouge] ***** (1994, Irène Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Frédérique Feder, Jean-Pierre Lorit) – Classic Movie Review 8721

Director Krzysztof Kieslowski saves the best for last in the highly impressive final part of his trilogy, the exquisitely subtle 1994 masterpiece Three Colors: Red [Trois Couleurs: Rouge]. It was nominated for three Oscars, including Best Director, Best Cinematography (Piotr Sobocinski) and Best Original Screenplay (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz ).

Irene Jacob stars as young student/ model Valentine, whose car collides with a dog, which she takes home to its owner, a solitary, bitter and elderly judge, Le juge Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant), whose pastime is to listen in on his neighbours’ phone calls. Jacob has never met her Geneva neighbour Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit), whose life as a young magistrate parallels Trintignant’s.

Three Colors: Red [Trois Couleurs: Rouge] has an intriguing set-up, which is then tautly handled like an art-house thriller by Kieslowski, who attends lovingly to his tiny handful of characters and their Geneva milieu, getting plenty of mileage out of the extraordinariness of life and the possibilities that we can imagine but not understand.

The film is both teasing and touching, and the two contrasting central performances are electric, with Trintignant never better in a steely-eyed portrait of a lifetime’s disappointment suddenly redeemed. It looks a treat too in Piotr Sobocinski’s cinematography, and there is plenty of red!

It reunites Kieslowski with Jacob, his star of The Double Life of Véronique.

Kieslowski announced his retirement after making this acclaimed film that shocked Cannes festival-goers in 1994 by winning no awards after being a nominee for the Palme d’Or. He died of a heart attack on 13 March 1996, aged 54.

In 2012 Trintignant was on this brilliant form again in the masterly Amour.

Pulp Fiction shocked by taking the Palme d’Or in 1994. This just goes too show how crazy competitions are. How can you compare the chalk and cheese of Three Colors: Red and Pulp Fiction, which are movies from different planets.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8721

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