Last Thursday night I finished watching Krzysztof Kiewslowski's Three Colours Trilogy. Here are my conclusions. I thought of polishing them and sticking them up on Samizdata, but decided not to because that would be too exhausting. So here, all crude and immediate, but delayed, they are:
Blue is a boring story, worse than boringly told. This is a terrible film. Had it been on TV it would have been off in about ten minutes max, and that would have been that, Blue, White and Redwise. To think that brainless posh bimbo Juliette Binoche actually boasts in an attached interview that she found being in Blue more "interesting" than being in Jurassic Park. She spoke proudly of this decision as being a big influence – a path chooser as it were – on her career. I'll say.
Particularly dire is the fact that one of the leading characters in Blue is a composer, and we hear some of his music. This is always a mistake. It wasn't the kind of music such a person would produce. It was the kind of music a film music composer thinks that such a person should have produced, i.e. tuneful and upliftingly cliché ridden. But this was for a classical concert organised by the European Union. Tuneless slop would be the order of the day, so tuneful and uplifting slop is completely unrealistic. The actual composer of this stuff was a guy called Preiser, who also did all the real film music for the other two films.
White is an interesting story, quite interestingly told. Although maybe after seeing Blue, anything would have seemed okay.
Red is a quite interesting story, boringly told.
The only interesting or likeable major character in the three of them is the Pole, Karol. He marries and annoying French actressy type woman, and she dumps him because he is so poor he can't perform sexually, but he goes back to Poland, gets rich, and has his revenge. All the French characters in Blue, White and Red are decorative, boring, stupid, narcissistic and pointless, and doing utterly pointless things. They have very tiny brains (although in their tiny-brained way they do not realise this), and they occupy these tiny brains entirely with making themselves miserable. Sadly from the cinema audience point of view, they do this, what with their brains being so tiny, e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y. At the final end of the story there is a ferry disaster, which all the major characters turn out to have survived. Only Karol should have. The rest should have been drowned.
By the way, it isn't just that concert in Blue - which in typical Euro style never actually seems to happen, or is at least heavily delayed – that is being paid for by the EU; this entire set of films was made with the help of EU money. This strongly suggests to me that the European Union is doomed. Who but doomed idiots would pay for things like the things in these films to be said about them?
Why are all the French characters so intolerable? I can think of two possible reasons. First, Kiewslowski hates the French and wants to present them as boring idiots, and loves only his fellow countrymen. Second, my preferred explanation, Kiewslowski is himself an idiot, and imagines that the way his French characters behave is somehow elevated and meaningful, rather than stupid.
The European Union money aspect of the situation makes more sense with this idiotic-friendly interpretation of Kiewslowski's attitude to the French, which is strongly shared by many French persons of the European Union sort, I surmise.
Kiewslowski lavishes expensive state-of-the-art camerawork on these French persons as they go about their pointless existences, and thus the effect of watching Blue and Red is of having been kidnapped and imprisoned in a photograph exhibition, where all the captions consist of boring gibberish. Except, it's far, far worse than that, because you have to trudge through the exhibition at a set speed in a set time, reading all the stupid captions, and viewing all the stupidly pretty photos in a set order and for only a set time. My mind kept wandering. If I hadn't been able to rewind to find out what, if anything, had just been said, I would have got completely lost immediately.
In a way, these films are prophecies of the contrasting fortunes of France and Poland during the years following them. France has stagnated prettily. Poland has bounded ahead, crippled only by its amazing unwillingness to accept how much better it is doing than France, and pathetic belief that it must grovel politically to France. Why? People like Kiewslowski is my guess.
I know what you're thinking. Why the hell did I subject myself to this insane ordeal? Well, I kept hoping that things might improve, and during White, after a miserable first half hour spent in France, things moved to Poland and they did. Karol the Pole had a meaningful life, and he got on with it, and what is more he got on with it at a cinematically acceptable speed, giving the stupid French film star woman he had married the comeuppance she deserved. (Why she ended up on the ferry I didn't get. She should have stayed in prison.) Maybe Red would be as much better than White as White was better than Blue. To the end I lived in hope. After all, White proved that this man could entertain (he's dead now thank God), when he was in the mood to do so. That's the first reason I kept watching.
Second, insofar as most of it was rubbish, I kept watching because I knew that, what with me being a Culture Blogger, I would soon have the pleasure of informing the world of this fact. A misery denounced is still a misery, but it's a lot less of one.
Third, I have long been prejudiced against "Foreign Language" films. "Foreign Language" films, by the way, are not just films in a foreign language. They are films which either are in a foreign language, or which might as well be in a foreign language for all the sense they make. Look in Blockbuster under "foreign language", and you'll see just what I mean. English as a foreign language is not just something you can teach to Japanese students. English as a foreign language is the language of critically acclaimed and important films, full of meaningful (a critic-speak word meaning meaningless) camerawork, which happen to have been made in English, due to a commercial oversight by the people who normally ensure that such films only get made in real foreign languages.
Anyway, as I say, I acquired a prejudice when I was a peer-group-dominated undergraduate at Cambridge University against critically acclaimed meaningfully meaningless films, attending many such films, pretending to like them and only later realising that I thought they were mostly rubbish, and I wanted to check out whether my prejudice was still justified. Recently I've been noting a tendency in myself to become grown-up in my movie tastes, and not to like bad American movies either. What was happening? Was I becoming a continental European? Luckily I'm not, but I wanted to check it out.
Also, when some idiot at a party says to me: So, you hate meaningfully meaningless foreign language films do you?, when was the last time you saw one? – I want to be able to say that I saw one this century and that it was indeed rubbish. Blue certainly fitted that scenario.
A final word on all that critical acclaim. It's my understand that this three films were indeed critically acclaimed, and at the time they were emitted in the mid-nineties, I read some of this acclaim. But I made sure I read none of it this time around, googling the thing only to find out which order to watch them in. I will now look at this acclaim, because I expect it to confirm several more prejudices I have, this time not about movies so much as about movie critics. I promise nothing, but stay tuned.
