Three Colors
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Buena Vista Home Entertainment / 1993-1994 / 98 Minutes / Rated R
Street Date: March 4, 2003 
With the following admission, I am about to commit an act of film snob heresy. As great a supporter of foreign, independent, and art-house cinema as I am, and as much as I have praised (perhaps even overpraised) in the past movies that many viewers might label "pretentious," I have always found Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski's famed Three Colors Trilogy to be an overrated, self-indulgent bore. At the time of their release in 1994, Kieslowski was being lauded in many critical circles as the greatest filmmaker who had ever lived, and these films were called his final, triumphant masterworks. Kieslowski announced his retirement upon completion of the trilogy, and died not long afterwards, no doubt with some smug sense of satisfaction at the legacy he was leaving. Ever fond of working with grand themes (his Dekalog was a series of short films based on the 10 Commandments), Kieslowski's titles for the three movies (Blue, White, and Red) are meant to stand for the three colors of the French flag, representing Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Normally I'm a sucker for exactly this type of thoughtful, artistically-designed film, but when I went to see Trois Couleurs: Bleu in the theater I swear it put me out like a light less than halfway through its short 98-minute runtime. Now I am a person who almost never falls asleep during movies, no matter how dull; I'm just not wired that way, but Blue put me down faster than a tranquilizer. At the time I tried to chalk this up to my not feeling well, or not getting enough sleep, or eating too much beforehand, or something. I dutifully went to the other two movies in the series as they were released, not really hating either one exactly (if only by virtue of the fact that I managed to stay awake for them), but not thinking all too highly of them either. Yet over the years my other film snob friends have tried to convince me of their greatness, of their deeply profound meaning, and the amazing cinematic genius who created them. So now here the Three Colors films are on DVD and I'm ready to re-evaluate them. I want to give them a fair shot with an open mind. I'm well-rested, it's early in the evening, I'm mentally prepared, and...Wouldn't you know it but halfway through Blue I'm struggling again with every fiber of my being to stay awake for the damned thing. I'm sorry, I still find this movie utterly tedious. Sure, the movie is well made and beautifully photographed, and the lovely Juliette Binoche is easy on the eyes, but I just don't see the greatness in this film. It just isn't there in anything I'm watching. Where others find profundity and depth, I see only shallow layers of superficial symbolism masquerading as meaning. Where others experience life-affirming revelation, I watch a pretty French actress mope around for an hour and half with a pouty expression on her face.
The story of Blue can be told in one sentence: When a pretty French girl's husband and child die in a car accident, she gets really sad. That's it; that's the whole movie. There's nothing more to it than that. Oh wait, Kieslowski the filmmaker has a thousand different ways of showing us that she's sad, all of which involve her moping around and looking pouty while the movie's photography is doused in various shades of blue... Get it? Because she's feeling blue. So he makes everything look blue. Get it? Isn't that just so deep? Wow, Kieslowski must have been a genius to discover such revolutionary use of symbolism! And then when she's feeling especially sad, the music on the soundtrack (her husband was a composer and she hears his tune) swells up really loudly, and the picture fades to black, and then it fades right back in on the same shot. Innovative brilliance! Give this man his Oscar! So that's the first act in the great trilogy, and already I am underwhelmed again. To be honest, Trois Couleurs: Blanc is the only of these films I'd ever come close to calling "good." Funnily, this runs exactly contrary to popular opinion that it is the weakest link in the series. I guess I'm crazy because it's the only one I can stand. The story of a schlubby Polish hairdresser whose pretty French wife (the lovely Julie Delpy) dumps him and leaves him with nothing, despite its title White is actually a very dark comedy. Its lead character, the redundantly-named Karol Karol, is so down on his luck that when he tries to sneak back into Poland by hiding in a large suitcase, the bag is stolen and thieves beat the tar out of him when they find that he has only some change in his pocket. His life doesn't look much better from there until he eventually manages to turn things around and the movie becomes a rather amusing revenge story. Is this a great movie? Is it deep and profound art? Certainly not, but it is relatively entertaining and I didn't hate myself for having sat through it twice in one lifetime. With this minor peak in my viewing pleasure, at this point I'm thinking that maybe things will get really good for the finale and tie everything up in a manner that puts a positive spin on the whole trilogy. When I had first seen Trois Couleurs: Rouge upon its release, I recall thinking that it was better than Blue but still nothing special. I must have been in an especially generous mood that day, because rewatching it now I have to say that Red is just a dreadful, wretched, terrible waste of a movie. The story this time is about a pretty French girl (do I sense a theme here?) who meets a cranky old curmudgeon that she must help to bring out of his shell, all while learning valuable life lessons about herself. The script is of the quality of a bad TV movie, overwhelmed by simplistic characters and themes that are beaten into our heads with agonizing, portentous dialogue and more heavy-handed symbolism than both the first two movies combined. The lovely Irene Jacob is, like the others, very easy on the eyes, and she has been a fine actress in a number of other movies, but she must have been squandered by a lack of decent direction here because her performance in this film is very poor.
The grand theme of Red is supposed to be about Fate, and Coincidence, and the way everyone in the world is connected, but like everything in this trilogy it all amounts to a bunch of pretentious nonsense. There is a subplot about a young man and his girlfriend that is meant to be Very Important, and parallels the two main characters in the film, but it is not developed well enough to be meaningful and winds up as simply pointless. Then the movie wraps the trilogy up with a wholly illogical ending that brings the characters of the three movies together in a ridiculous, contrived, nonsensical event that is supposed to be, again, Very Meaningful. I ask this simple question: How could Dominique have gotten there considering her fate at the end of White? I'm sure I could bluff my way though a rationalization for an answer, but would it be worth the effort? I actually found myself getting angry with the film at how increasingly awful it became in every new scene. I swear this is truly the low-point in an overrated trilogy. I realize that in writing this I run the risk of sounding like an uncultured ass, and that I will no doubt hear from some readers who either: a) write me vitriolic hate mail for disparaging movies that had such a profound effect on their lives, or b) tell me, "Right on, dude. Movies with subtitles suck!" But I have to be truthful with my feelings. To gloss through these movies' flaws would be intellectually dishonest, almost as much as the movies themselves. Yes, I "get" the films. I understand Kieslowski's use of symbolism and film language (frankly, he's far from subtle), but all he has truly given us is a lot of showy technique without substance, as much as he would like us to believe otherwise. Worse, the films are made with a patronizing tone that is designed to make viewers feel stupid for not appreciating them. I see through the ploy, and I find the whole thing simply insufferable. I wish I could see in these films what others do. Instead, all I see is an elaborate excuse to photograph pretty French girls in beautiful lighting. I enjoy watching that sort of thing as much as the next guy, but there needs to be something more to make me connect with the material, and I'm just not finding it here. I certainly don't claim to speak for anyone but myself when I say that the Three Colors Trilogy was a monumental waste of my time, doubly so since I've seen it twice now. I will not make the mistake a third time.
Video: How Does The Disc Look? Credit where it is due, the Three Colors movies are gorgeously photographed, and the 1.85:1 anamorphically-enhanced transfers on these three DVDs from Miramax are quite splendid indeed. Could Blue the movie be any bluer? The entire movie is inundated with stylized hues and washes of color, and every shade of blue in the spectrum is represented nicely. White has the roughest look of the three, being intentionally grainy. This does unfortunately lead to some compression problems (notice the frozen grain patterns early in the film), but nothing too severe. Flesh tones in this middle movie also run a little too pinkish. Red is then the best-looking of the three, a slick and glossy picture with very little grain at all and lots of vibrant reds on display with no sign of video noise or distortion. All three movies are troubled by a touch of artificial edge enhancement. Fortunately, it is not too badly implemented. The ringing halos are fairly small and only rarely intrusive. Aside from the grain issues at the beginning of White, compression quality on the whole is decent without any significant problems. The movies are all exquisitely lit, reproduced with a fine contrast range, and the DVDs provide an engaging, film-like image. Audio: How Does The Disc Sound? The original French-language soundtracks of each movie are presented in Dolby 2.0 surround. These weren't blockbuster action extravaganzas, but they do tend to have interesting sound designs that can get surprisingly loud when they need to. Music is an important part of the story in Blue, and the score here achieves a nice swell that fills the room. It also has a number of strangely recorded sound effects that have a deliberately hollow ambience (they are meant to represent the character's confused state of mind). The opening scene in Red even has a very aggressive sense of surround envelopment. The movies are all primarily talky in nature, with many periods of reflective silence, and dialogue is always clear and intelligible. 5.1 remixing probably wouldn't have done anything to enhance the films, so what we get is perfectly satisfactory in its faithfulness to the original audio tracks. Each disc features English subtitles and English subtitles for the Hearing Impaired, as well as true Closed Captioning. Supplements: What Goodies Are There? Miramax obviously considers these films to be prestige items among their catalog, and they have gone all out in lavishing them with the special edition treatment. These are probably the most elaborate collections of bonus features that Miramax has released on DVD to date. Some of this material may have been recycled from the European DVD releases, but regardless the sheer volume of supplemental content remains impressive. Does quantity equal quality? I suppose that will depend on your outlook. If you like the movies, most likely you will find great value in the supplements here. If you don't like the movies, there is probably little here that will change your mind. In fact, it seems like every single supplement on each of these discs is designed to explain to us just one simple thing: Krzysztof Kieslowski was the most amazingly brilliant genius to have ever walked the face of the Earth. Personally, I got more than a little bit tired of having that opinion beaten into my head for hours upon hours. I'd go so far as to say that, after making it all the way through all of the supplements on all of the discs, these features had exactly the opposite of the intended effect on me. They did not enhance my appreciation of the films at all. By the end, I was so frustrated that I went from a mere dislike of these movies to an outright hatred of them. I hope that I can manage to go the rest of my lifetime without seeing anything else in any way related to the Three Colors Trilogy again. So, what is there on these DVDs, exactly? To start, all three movies contain feature-length audio commentaries by Annette Insdorf, who was Kieslowski's English translator, and as she relates it also his best friend and closest working companion in the whole world. Her approach to the commentary format is to treat it like a Symbolism for Dummies lecture, pointing out each and every instance of pretentious film language as they appear on screen. In the case of Blue, this means calling our attention to every usage of the color blue in the whole movie. I can tell you right now, every single shot in the movie contains the color blue. And she points out every last one. This grows tedious very quickly. Insdorf ingratiates herself throughout the supplements on these three discs, and either you will find her enormously insightful or you will rapidly grow to despise her. Can you guess which camp I'm in? Because the discs contain so many supplements, because they are largely repetitive in nature, and because they all basically tell us the exact same thing (Kieslowski was a god among men), it's easiest to just list the features by the order in which they appear. On Blue, we have:
Perhaps the most interesting feature on this first disc is the Kieslowski student film "Concert of Wishes," a 16-minute black & white story about teens on a camping trip. We can watch Kieslowski develop his command of film language, while recognizing that even here he preferred to deal with stories that were bizarre, nonsensical, and very boring. On the White disc:
More student films are provided this time around as well: Trolley (5 min.), The Face (6 min.), and The Office (6 min.). On Red:
No student films this time. Instead we get the Red at Cannes 1994 featurette (15 min.), which is an assemblage of interviews conducted with the director and cast during the festival. Including commentaries, that's almost 11 hours of material in all. Although way too much of it features the annoying Annette Insdorf, there is also a satisfying amount of participation from the beautiful French women who starred in these movies, and honestly those parts weren't too painful to watch. Each of the three discs also contains a Kieslowski Filmography in text format, and a small assortment of sneak peaks, which is where you will find the trailers for these movies, albeit not on the disc for the movie they go with. DVD-ROM Exclusives: What do you get when you pop the disc in your PC? There are no ROM supplements on these discs. This is the one area that Miramax decided to skimp on. Parting Thoughts Miramax is releasing Kieslowski's Three Colors Trilogy either individually, at an MSRP of $19.99 each, or packaged together in a box set for the reduced price of $39.99. The discs themselves are identical either way. The movies are intended to go together to form one whole entity, and even I, a person who likes only one of the three films, would probably be inclined to buy them together. Honestly, of course, I wouldn't be inclined to buy them at all, but if these movies float your boat then I would be remiss not to recommend them. The transfers are good, the sound is good, and there are tons of supplements that (if you're a fan) tell you exactly what you want to hear many times over. So enjoy them, Kieslowski fans. Forgive me if I'm not ready to join your club. |
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