Reviews the three parts of "Three colours"

Rating: 8/10 (22 September 2010)

Apparently most people prefer Blue, I don't (I can see you coming and saying that's it's just my contradictory mind). Really, I found it beautiful, aesthetically and on the acting level (yes, I agree with everybody on the fact that Binoche is wonderful). But it was quite boring; especially it was so long to really start, but I guess it's how grieving is, long and boring. So people die, survivors survive: OK, life goes on, we know that. Therefore I started White with a bit of apprehension, and finally was really caught quickly. I will even dare saying it's somewhat Kusturician. Is it because it's mainly base in Eastern Europe that I have this feeling, or is Eastern European genuinely crazier and more surreal than us? I guess the fact that Eastern Europe had a lot to catch up with Western Europe at the time of the film allowed to use crazy ideas as importing a dead body from Russia to fake your own death. Apart that, I was really interested by this man who couldn't satisfy his wife as long as they were married, and could start doing it again as soon as he was supposed to be dead, meaning as soon as any commitment was impossible. Power, commitment and sexuality: such a millenary-old story. After this Red could have been a bit boring too, but it was very intriguing so it compensated the absence of surrealism. I just had a real difficulty to like Irène Jacob's character (Valentine): she's so naive and full of guilt, it's annoying, please shake her a bit! Which reminds me that I deny that any woman can be as Dominique (played by Julie Delpy) in White. Seriously, yes some divorces can be ugly, but it's rarely that intensely ugly. But I guess it's part of the surrealism of White. I think in fact which annoys me more in White is not in White but in Red. When you end up seeing the link between the three movies, you discover that Karol (the ex-impotent ex-husband of White) is finally back with her, and I find this so improbable: first she was in prison, and unless he reported himself as having faked his own death (in which case he would be now the one in prison, not on this boat), I can't see how she would have been released; second, even if she had been released otherwise, how could she be willing to go back to him after he planned a so big revenge? And more globally, what is this stupid link between the three films? The three couples (or will-be couples) happened to take the same boat, and worse, to be the only survivors of this boat's sinking. This is so happy-ended and unnecessary: I don't think the three stories needed to be linked more than by a random and meaningless meeting (when Julie in Blue steps into the courtroom where Karol and Dominique are divorcing for example, it's enough). Which by the way leads their meeting's number to twice: what is the probability of that, people not knowing each other encountering, and then when not living in the same country anymore, meeting again on the way to a third country? And plus what is the probability that they survive all together? In fact I was expecting them to die when they started speaking about the sinking on TV: I guess the probability that they die all together is not better, so maybe Kieslowski should have given up on linking them at the end. Because the link is already elsewhere: loneliness and death are all along the three movies. People die, people survive, people fake their death, people stop loving after the death of a loved one... People are in love but lonely: Julie is in love with a dead husband, Karol is in love with his ex-wife, Valentine is in love with a jealous long-distance boyfriend. People are together but lonely, more or less haunted by death. This is how I see the big theme. I can't see the meant-to-be "Freedom, Equality, Fraternity". OK, not really fair in fact: I can see some freedom in Blue, in how Julie chooses to deal her own way with her grief; I can see some fraternity in Red, in how Valentine and the old judge learn from each other; but I can't see any equality, neither in White, nor in the others (because I guess this three themes are not that simply distributed between the three movies). Anyway, I am sure this trilogy is far richer than this and that anybody would find something different in it.