The Colors of Existence

Back when Miramax was king, it released Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy, Trois Couleurs, in certain parts of the world.

Bleu, whose opening reminds me of a certain segment of part of Michael Haneke's Glaciation Trilogy, starts off the triad on an excellent note. Leave it to the above-mentioned director's favorite actress to portray the pain of grief like no other. Julie (Juliette Binoche) attempts everything to forget the death of her family in a car accident. Binoche is the kind of actress, like many contemporaries from Europe, which you can stare at for hours even though she may, at first glance, appear quite discreet.

The color blue is, of course, ever-present; in Julie's lost daughter's lollypop, in a glass lamp, in a pool in which she swims. As she moves on her own, she begins to re-discover the world, no longer being the wealthy wife of a composer who left an unfinished work commissioned for the EU, which plays a key part. Her new neighborhood is kind of rough and, due to her trauma, she seems to experience it with the mind of a child, as though for the first time. Music, however, remains part of her life and plays at the moments in which she seems most alive. "Nothing is important" she utters, as she is given, momentarily, a belonging of her dead husband.

The "rat family" dilemma introduces a brilliant move in the film, as does the persona of a mysterious flute-player. "Now I have one thing left to do; nothing," she tells her couch-potato mother. In Binoche's world that is, in fact, a lot.

Blanc starts with the simple yet remarkable surprise of Julie briefly entering a courtroom in which divorce proceedings are taking place, linking both films together. Dominique (Julie Delphy), French, and Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), Polish, are breaking up, apparently due to his sexual dysfunction. Dominique wants all of the couple's assets though she claims to care about him. Unfortunately, Karol is left homeless.

Karol befriends a countryman, Mikołaj (Janusz Gajos), who employs him as a hitman to carry out the killing of an unknown person in the near future. He returns to Poland inside his large suitcase, which appears at the beginning of the film. We see the color white in Dominique's weeding dress as well as in the snowy Poland.

Back in Poland, Karol reunites with his brother and begins to work. While listening to a French lesson on tape, he kisses a bust, hinting at the cold-hearted Dominique. In Warsaw, where he is to execute the mystery man, he realizes it was in fact Mikolaj. In a turn of events, Karol does not kill him on second thought. While scheming over land against some mobsters and amassing cash, he then plots to exact revenge on Dominique, who's humiliated him in more ways than one.

Though Rouge predates it, the film begins with a tracking Matrix-esque shot of a telephone line during a call. From this very shot onwards, we begin to see the color red in various objects, including at an apartment belonging to model Valentine (Irène Jacob). Maybe my mind is being selective, but this appears to be the clearest case of color alluding to the title being used in the production design of the trilogy.

Valentine hits a dog, Rita, with her Fiat and decides to take it to its owner, judge Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who does not want it back. Over the phone, her boyfriend seems jealous as this is how the two met. The dog runs away and returns to Kern's. There, Valentine discovers Kern listens in on his neighbors' conversations. Just as the case was presented at the start of Blanc, we see the phone is also presented at the beginning of Rouge.

A series of conversations and events relating to the phone-tapping begin to occur between Valentine and Kern, which develop into friendship, that may remind you of the more recent Das Leben der Anderen. Once again, an ending occurring in a ferry accident ties all three films together in a surprising, emotional way.

While each story speaks of the human condition in remarkable ways, much has been made of the themes of each film; the historic Liberté, égalité, fraternité. However, that people of different walks of life may see themselves reflected in Trois Couleurs is its true triumph.