Red
With Irene Jacob, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Frederique Feder, and Jean-Pierre Lorit.
Perhaps one reason why we can accept the strange congruences of Kieslowski’s world even when our rational responses reject them is that the city of Geneva itself and its customary channels of communication and connection help to bring them about. Streets, cars, windows, posters, newspapers, radios, TVs, and, most of all, telephones become the vehicles of casual conjunctions and gorgeous everyday miracles, suggesting that these channels could bring all of us together in ways that we never suspected, even if they usually don’t. Valentine has a jealous boyfriend living in England, and Auguste’s girlfriend in her flat operates a telephone weather-report service periodically used by the judge. All five of these characters rely on telephones as conduits out of their isolation, even if they more often only confirm their loneliness. The remarkable opening sequence traces the phone lines between Valentine and her boyfriend across the English channel, red wires and all. It’s the first of Kieslowski’s many dry and mordant Polish jokes: at the end of this epic journey, the call hits a busy signal.
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When the judge is brought to court after confessing to a crime, Valentine learns about it in the newspaper, and when Valentine makes an appearance at a fashion show, the judge learns about it the same way. Even if Valentine and Auguste never meet, their apartment windows repeatedly frame each other’s activities in the streets below. The huge poster advertising chewing gum that we see Valentine posing for is eventually unfurled on a busy intersection; soon afterward, she returns to her flat and finds the lock to the front door jammed with chewing gum, most likely as a result of this poster. It is a car accident that causes Valentine to come into contact with the judge, and it is a busy intersection where Auguste drops his law books while crossing the street; one book falls open to the page that contains the answer to a key question on the law exam he is about to take, a chance occurrence that also happened to the judge many years before.
Apart from a few obvious exceptions, masterpieces take a while to impose themselves and be recognized as masterpieces. People often prefer to forget this, but excitement about the first features of Godard, Truffaut, and Resnais in the late 50s and early 60s was not universally shared, nor were their meanings fully apparent the first time around, not even to critics. A lot of proselytizing, discussion, and debate had to take place before they began to take on the status of classics. The same process took place with Bergman, Antonioni, and Fellini; long before these and other filmmakers became canonized and then vulgarized by imitation in American movies (by directors ranging from Woody Allen to Bob Fosse to Paul Mazursky), they were still regarded as controversial and problematic artists, and in some respects they remain so even today–which is why the most recent works of all three, all made many years ago, have yet to be released in this country. (Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander is a six-hour film made for Swedish TV, and the version shown in the U.S. is 105 minutes shorter than the original; Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman and Fellini’s The Voice of the Moon have never been released here in any form.) Nowadays most critics, lulled by outsized studio ad campaigns and eager for the currency that comes with instant recognition, tend to be much lazier than they used to be about grappling with difficult and innovative pictures, and many go out of their way to avoid them entirely. Many of the most important new names in international cinema are missing from the just-published third edition of David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema, and the same is partially true for the posthumously completed second edition of Ephraim Katz’s Film Encyclopedia, ratifying the relative inertia of critics happy to stick mainly or exclusively with Hollywood merchandise.
In fact, Denby’s entire paragraph reeks of the kind of unearned (albeit confident) authority that governs film culture at the moment. His statement that Kieslowski’s trilogy has been hailed as a major work “in Europe and in some quarters in America” automatically implies that Europe is unified and uniform in praising “Three Colors” while America is not–the sort of assumption one can make only if one doesn’t go to the trouble of checking the facts. A few French critics, for instance, scornfully speak about Kieslowski’s “cinema of Esperanto.” Moreover, Denby’s divvying up of “the world market” between America and Europe excludes the rest of the world as immaterial when it might be argued that a key difference between contemporary film culture and that of the 50s and 60s is the emergence of major filmmakers in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia–not “major” in the sense of Tarantino or Spielberg but “major” in at least the same ballpark as Ozu, Mizoguchi, or Satyajit Ray–and major inroads made by Asian commercial films in the world market as well. And is “cultured in a trancelike way” supposed to refer only to Red and not to Pulp Fiction? Kieslowski has Valentine tell her boyfriend on the phone how much she liked Dead Poets Society. Is this pop reference “blown away” by the equally adoring references to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders in Pulp Fiction?
On the other hand, Kieslowski’s sardonic and absurdist Polish wit infuses his films with a kind of caustic irony that is quite distinct from anything found in the French New Wave. As suggested earlier, Red abounds in poker-faced Polish jokes, from the scene of the German shepherd escaping from Valentine into a church service, to Valentine hitting the jackpot on the slot machine in her neighborhood cafe, which leads a bystander to comment that it’s a sign of bad luck. Much later, the row of winning cherries gets framed in the foreground of a shot while one of the characters passes outside the cafe in the background, comprising not so much a new joke as a reminder of the earlier one. Like so much of Kieslowski’s style and vision, his wit tends to be more interrogative than declarative, which may cause difficulties for viewers accustomed to Hollywood platitudes. The kind of cinema more interested in posing questions than in answering them–the cinema of Stroheim, Preminger, Rossellini, Cassavetes, Rivette, and Kieslowski, among others–is always bound to encounter resistance from critics and others who go to movies in search of certainties, and who often settle for half-truths or outright lies as a consequence. To interrogate the world is to inaugurate a search that continues after the movie’s over, implying a lack of closure that most commercial movies shun like the plague.
