Tonight's Dartmouth Film Society screening of director Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy offers a special opportunity to explore the theme of this term's series, "Auteurs."
Blue, White and Red (titled after the three colors of the French flag) represent the final product of the great Polish director's oeuvre. Thematically, each film picks up after its corresponding part of the revolutionary cry of liberty, equality and fraternity.
"Blue" features Juliet Binoche as a recently widowed composer who attempts to achieve true freedom by breaking off all ties with the past, present and future.
She neither mourns for her lost family, nor contacts her lover, nor retains any of her previous possessions. Unfortunately, freedom is not so easy to achieve, and Kieslowski, seemingly effortlessly, breaks down the castle she had built with subtly dropped innuendo: a television photo of her deceased husband.
"White" explores the theme of equality through the relationship between a Polish barber, Karol, and his beautiful but somewhat cold ex-wife, played by Julie Delpy (co-star of last year's "Before Sunrise").
After the divorce hearings, Karol is forced to leave France. Upon arriving in Poland, he appears to have hit rock bottom. But given Kieslowski's taste for irony, an impotent barber quickly becomes a success by the wild-west capitalism of Eastern Europe.
Red has an ostensibly simple plot at its core: a bitter old man is reawakened through his friendship with a naive, but kind, young woman. However, all kinds of metaphysical issues are raised, among them the current status of God (or is it just Prospero?), the inability to communicate, the role of fate and the false nature of images, to name a few.
And, moreover, all these issues interrelate, making for one of the more complex, and thus, rich films made not only in the last five years, but during the last hundred of cinema.
Quite simply, the definition of a must-see film.
