Three Colors: Red
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Red is the English language title of the 1994 French language film, Trois Couleurs: Rouge (available with English subtitles).
Co-written, produced, and directed by a Pole, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Red is the final film of the Three Colors trilogy, themed on the French Revolutionary ideals, preceded first by Blue and then White. It was selected by the New York Times as one of "The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made."
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Primary cast
- Irene Jacob: "Valentine Dussaut"
- Jean-Louis Trintignant: "Joseph Kern"
- Jean-Pierre Lorit: "Auguste Bruner"
- Frederique Feder: "Karin"
Awards
- Nominated for three Academy Awards:
- National Board of Review, Best Foreign Language Film
- New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Best Foreign Language Film
- National Society of Film Critics Awards, Best Foreign Language Film
- Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, Best Foreign Film
- Zbigniew Preisner won the Cesar Award for Best Music.
- Cesar Award nominations:
- Best Film
- Best Actor: (Jean-Louis Trintignant)
- Best Actress: (Irene Jacob)
- Best Director: (Krzysztof Kieślowski)
- Best Writing: (Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz)
Plot synopsis
Set in Geneva, Switzerland, and like its predecessors, a multi-layered story with many messages, Red has perhaps the simplest storyline in the Three Colors trilogy. It also received more English media recognition than Blue or White, after the critical successes of the first two parts of the trilogy.
The film begins with clips that track a telephone call between London and Geneva, where a naïve university student and part-time model, Valentine, is talking to her emotionally distant but possessive boyfriend. Valentine meets a lonely retired judge, Joseph Kern, after accidentally injuring his dog. The film eventually focuses on the consequences of Kern's surveillance of private telephone conversations, and the platonic friendship that develops between Kern and Valentine as he reveals his personal history to her.
A parallel story follows Valentine's neighbor, a legal student named Auguste, who is in and out of her daily routine without either realizing it. Auguste undergoes a personal betrayal by his girlfriend, Karin, whose conversations have been monitored by her neighbor, Kern. This is nearly identical to the experience that made Kern a bitter recluse, to the point that Auguste and Kern appear to be the same character at different points in time — a reversal of the story device in Kieślowski's earlier film The Double Life of Véronique, in which the lives of two identical characters followed different tracks.
Analysis
The varieties of interpersonal connections between the characters illustrate the film's theme, friendship or fraternity (the third principle of the motto of the French Republic on which the Three Colors series is based). Barriers to personal contact occur throughout the story in several forms: telephone communication, which allows interaction without any emotional commitment, and scenes in which the principal action occurs behind a window. Eventually, Kern's interaction with Valentine leads him to make steps toward reconnection with the people he has previously only observed through windows and wires. When he reveals his eavesdropping, his neighbors throw rocks through his windows, and the end of the film shows Kern listening to a mention of Valentine and Auguste on the news while watching the outside world through broken glass.
A technically and thematically sophisticated production, Red uses numerous devices to convey moods and ideas that sum up the aims of the entire trilogy while adding a new warmth, suggesting that the common unifying theme is love. As in the previous two films, a single color recurs throughout: in telephone signals, on the canopy of the neighborhood restaurant, on a character's automobile, and on a huge advertising banner featuring Valentine's facial profile. At the conclusion of the film, a final twist of fate brings together the main characters from the entire trilogy.
"This is the kind of film that makes you feel intensely alive while you're watching it, and sends you out into the streets afterwards eager to talk deeply and urgently to the person you are with. Whoever that happens to be."
— Roger Ebertfr:Trois couleurs : Rouge
it:Tre colori: Film Rosso