The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Krzysztof Kieślowski · three feature films · 1993 to 1994 · written with Krzysztof Piesiewicz · in French and Polish
Mode
Trilogy of feature films on one civic programme; tragedy of grief, black comedy of revenge and metaphysical romance under one law
Mythos
Death and return three times, through water, through the tomb and through the flood; the ark that saves the tested couples; an old man who listens like a god and gives away the life he missed
Phase
Three stories, from a crash on a country road to a ferry sinking in the Channel, each turning on a return from death
Presentation
Three features in colour, written with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, music by Zbigniew Preisner, produced by Marin Karmitz for MK2; photographed by Sławomir Idziak, Edward Kłosiński and Piotr Sobociński; first shown at Venice, Berlin and Cannes, September 1993 to May 1994
Register
From grief held almost wholly in one face to a hairdresser laughing on a rubbish tip; warm, tending to the lyrical
Scale
Three cities in three countries, three lives and their couples, the motto of a republic
Governing Proposition
Three films take the three colours of the French flag and the three words of the Republic’s motto, liberty, equality and fraternity, and live each one out in a private life: a widow who tries to want nothing, a husband who wants his wife to suffer what he suffered, a student who will not stop caring for a stranger. The wager of the trilogy is that each civic ideal, lived in private, turns against itself before it is redeemed, and that three films in three registers under one law can show this as one argument, gathered at the end on one ferry.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The trilogy is three feature films in colour, written by Kieślowski with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, with music by Zbigniew Preisner, produced by Marin Karmitz for MK2 as a French, Polish and Swiss co-production. Blue was first shown at Venice in September 1993, White at Berlin in February 1994 and Red at Cannes in May 1994. Each takes one colour of the French flag, and with it one word of the Republic’s motto, in order: liberty, equality, fraternity. Blue is set in Paris and is a tragedy of grief; White moves from Paris to Warsaw and is a black comedy of revenge; Red is set in Geneva and is a romance with a metaphysics. Each has its own photographer, Sławomir Idziak, Edward Kłosiński and Piotr Sobociński. Blue took the Golden Lion, shared with Altman’s Short Cuts, and the prize for best actress for Juliette Binoche; White took the Silver Bear for direction; Red won nothing at Cannes and was later nominated for three Academy Awards.
The three are bound as one. An event is seen from two sides: in Blue Julie opens a door at the Palais de Justice onto a divorce hearing, and that hearing opens White. In each film an old person struggles to push a bottle into a bottle bank, and each protagonist’s response is a measure. In each, contact comes through an apparatus before it comes face to face. The law frames all three: the divorce court, a retired judge, a student who will become one. The colour of each title is laid into the image as a design rather than a symbol, and the same invented composer, Van den Budenmayer, invented by Kieślowski and Preisner, is cited in Blue and Red. All three end in one place, a ferry in the Channel.
Blue begins with a crash on a country road. A boy, Antoine, playing with a cup-and-ball, sees it, and the sound comes before the image. Patrice, a famous composer, and his daughter Anna are killed. His wife Julie (Juliette Binoche) survives. In hospital she watches the funeral on a small television and traces the coffins with her finger. There are pills she cannot swallow. Each of the three films will turn on a return from death, and the first begins with it: the woman who lives on has lost everything she was bound to, and what she wants now is to be bound to nothing.
Movement II
Julie sells the house and everything in it. She sleeps once with Olivier (Benoît Régent), Patrice’s collaborator, and leaves. She takes an anonymous flat in Paris and keeps one thing from her daughter’s room, a mobile of blue glass. In a café she holds a sugar cube against her coffee until it darkens, then lets it drop. The camera goes close enough that the world shrinks to what she can bear to see: the cube, the coffee, an eye in which the doctor was reflected. At night she swims in a blue pool.
The bonds return uninvited. A flute player in the street plays a phrase of Patrice’s unfinished concerto. When the music comes to her, the screen fades to black and the concerto’s brass breaks in, and in the pool her body folds under the water. Her neighbours raise a petition against Lucille (Charlotte Véry), a stripper, and Julie will not sign it. A mouse gives birth to a litter in a cupboard, and Julie borrows a cat. She visits her mother (Emmanuelle Riva), who has dementia, watches television, and takes her for her sister. In her bag she finds a blue lollipop, bitten: the one moment the dead child is touched.
At the bottle bank an old person struggles to push a bottle in. Julie, sunning herself with her eyes closed, does not see. The film’s first word, liberty, has been taken at its most literal: a freedom made of refusing every tie, every possession, every memory and every piece of music. Lived that way it is not freedom but a second death, and each thing she tries not to want comes back, the flute, the mouse, the woman the neighbours want gone.
Movement III
Olivier finds her. Patrice had left unfinished a concerto for the unification of Europe. At the club where Lucille works, a television programme on Patrice shows photographs of a young woman Julie has never seen: Sandrine (Florence Pernel), his mistress, who is carrying his child. Julie finds her. She gives her the house, and she gives the child Patrice’s name.
Then she returns to the score. She works on it with Olivier, and the concerto is finished. Earlier a journalist had asked whether Julie wrote Patrice’s music, and the film never answers; the finishing leans one way. What she gives away, the house, the name and the music, is what she had tried to escape by refusing, and the giving is the only freedom the film allows her.
The last sequence is the concerto’s chorus. It sets St Paul’s hymn to love from the first letter to the Corinthians, in the Greek of the New Testament, beginning “Ean tais glōssais tōn anthrōpōn lalō kai tōn angelōn”, on speaking with the tongues of men and of angels. As it sings, the camera passes across the people the film has gathered: Antoine with the cup-and-ball, Julie’s mother, Lucille, Sandrine’s child on an ultrasound screen, Olivier. It comes last to Julie, behind glass, and she weeps. Liberty is recovered by consenting to the love the chorus names.
Movement IV
White begins with a suitcase on an airport carousel. Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a Polish hairdresser in Paris, climbs the steps of the Palais de Justice, and a pigeon soils his coat. His wife Dominique (Julie Delpy) divorces him because the marriage has not been consummated, and takes everything. She sets fire to a curtain in her salon and tells him she will say he did it. He sleeps in the Métro and plays a Polish tune on a comb and paper. Mikołaj (Janusz Gajos), a fellow Pole, offers him work, killing a man who wants to die, and smuggles him home in the suitcase.
At Warsaw the suitcase is stolen. Karol is beaten and thrown onto a rubbish tip in the snow, and he laughs and says “Nareszcie w domu” (“Home at last”). He goes to the salon of his brother Jurek (Jerzy Stuhr), works as a bodyguard for a money changer, overhears a plan of land purchases, buys first, and makes a fortune. In this Poland, equality has become a matter of money. The man who wants to die is Mikołaj. Karol fires a blank, then asks whether he is sure, and he is not. At the bottle bank Karol watches an old person struggle, with a knowing smile.
Karol fakes his own death with a Russian corpse, leaves his estate to Dominique, and watches her at his funeral. That night he goes to her hotel room; he is no longer impotent, and her cry dissolves into white. In the morning he is gone and she is arrested for his murder. The last scene sets him below her prison window. She signs to him with her hands, and he weeps. Equality is achieved, horribly and tenderly: she suffers what he suffered, by his design, and he has put her in prison to make it so.
Movement V
Red begins with telephone lines running under the Channel. Valentine (Irène Jacob), a student and model in Geneva, takes calls from a jealous boyfriend in England. She runs over a dog, and finds its owner: a retired judge, Joseph Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who listens in on his neighbours’ telephone calls. She is revolted, and is drawn back; he reports himself and is tried. Across the street, in shots that cross her path again and again, Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit), a law student, passes his exam when a dropped book falls open at the question, and is betrayed by Karin (Frédérique Feder), who sells weather forecasts by telephone. A great billboard shows Valentine in profile against red, advertising chewing gum. At the bottle bank, Valentine goes to help.
The judge comes to her fashion show. Afterwards, in the empty theatre, in a storm, he tells her his story, and it is Auguste’s: the dropped book, the woman who betrayed him, and a case he judged against the man who took her. The cynic who made himself a god by listening is undone by a girl who will not stop being kind, and he relives his own story in Auguste and gives the girl the life he missed. They have listened to the same record of Van den Budenmayer. She leaves for England by ferry.
The ferry sinks in the Channel. The judge, at his broken window, watches the news: seven survivors, among them Julie and Olivier, Karol and Dominique, Valentine and Auguste, and a barman. The last shot freezes Valentine’s profile against red, as on the billboard. The three returns from death, through water, through the tomb and through the flood, are gathered into one, and those saved from the sea are the couples the three films have tested. Kieślowski announced at Cannes in 1994 that Red would be his last film, and he made no other. He died in March 1996.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites at two levels. Within Blue almost nothing gives: the sugar cube, the mouse, the petition and the visits to the mother are each a station of Julie’s attempt to want nothing, and each is undone. Red is nearly as tight, since every crossing of Valentine and Auguste argues that a life can be lived again in another. Remove White and the triad loses equality, its only comic register and a couple on the ferry, so the design requires it, and the three are compelled together. The give is local, in one film’s machinery, and nothing in the whole depends on it. What holds the axis here is that slack: the bodyguard work, the land deal and the Russian corpse are machinery for a fortune the comedy needs only as fact. Parts of the bond are ligature, and the ferry, compelled by Red, is only permitted by Blue.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, film by film. In Blue, freedom as the refusal of every bond is a second death; the bond returns uninvited, in the flute, the mouse and the mistress, and liberty is recovered only by giving away the house, the name and the music. In White, equality sought inside love becomes the wish that the other suffer exactly what one suffered, and it is achieved, horribly and tenderly, by putting her in prison. In Red, fraternity is the risk of caring for a stranger. Together: each civic ideal, lived in private, turns against itself before it is redeemed. Held where it is because part of the disclosure is carried by mood, and the ideals are withdrawn from the public order they belong to.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation is frequent in Blue and Red, rarer in White. The fades to black in Blue, each with the concerto’s brass breaking in, stop time as grief does. Julie folds under the water of the night pool as the music returns. The bitten blue lollipop is the one moment the dead child is touched. The last sequence of Blue passes over the faces to Julie’s tears behind glass. Karol laughs on the snow of the tip and weeps beneath the prison window. In Red, the judge confesses in an empty theatre in a storm. The height is warm, tending to the lyrical, and it is reached in all three registers, grief, farce and romance, across the whole of the trilogy. What holds it at the figure: White rises twice, the middle of Red is level by design, and the music sometimes supplies a height the image would earn alone.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The trilogy builds more than it alludes. Its load-bearing pattern is death and return, three times: Julie through water, the crash and then the pool as a drowning and a baptism; Karol through the tomb, the suitcase, the rubbish tip and the staged funeral; and the elect through the flood, seven saved from the sea. That last is the ark, built rather than cited, because the survivors are exactly the couples the trilogy has tested. Red builds a second myth over the first: an old man who has made himself a listening god relives his own story in Auguste and gives the girl the life he missed, a Prospero at his storm. The work itself gathers the three returns on one ferry, so the pattern is its structure, not the viewer’s. What holds it below the top: the tricolour is an emblem laid over the stories, and Karol’s fool borrows from Chaplin’s tramp.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is the post-war European art cinema, the Polish cinema of moral anxiety, and Kieślowski’s own recent turns: Dekalog, a cycle on a sacred programme, and The Double Life of Véronique, which had found the French co-production, the filters, Preisner and the metaphysics of chance. The departures are real: a trilogy announced as such and shown within nine months; a republic’s motto taken as programme and turned against itself; three genres under one law; colour laid in as structure across three photographers; and in Blue a score that is the plot’s object. The stake was three features in three countries and languages. What holds it at the bar is that the cycle form and the manner had already been proven twice.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the trilogy loses what it knows: that the three ideals are one argument, each turning against itself in its own way, which only three films in three registers under one law can show. Blue’s form is the instrument of its grief: the fades break the film where grief breaks time, the extreme close-ups shrink the world to what Julie can bear to see, and the music, half heard and broken off, is the bond she refuses. White’s comedy is required, since revenge as equality can be shown only at a distance that lets the viewer laugh at cruelty. Red’s crosscutting of two lives that almost meet is the form of chance, and the ferry gathers the three forms into one: it means nothing without the two films before it, so the form knows at the scale of the whole what no single film could. What holds it a step from the top is the middle of White, plot in a plain container.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Thirty-three years of return are evidence of a shorter kind, and the literature is substantial: Geoff Andrew’s BFI study, Annette Insdorf’s Double Lives, Second Chances, Slavoj Žižek’s The Fright of Real Tears, Joseph Kickasola’s The Films of Krzysztof Kieślowski. The questions are the films’ own and remain open: whether Julie wrote Patrice’s music, which a journalist asks and the film never answers; whether the judge is a man, a god or Auguste grown old; whether each ideal is redeemed or ironised; whether the ferry is grace or the director’s hand. Formal depth yields too, in the colour, the rhymes across films and the music’s returns. Held down by span, and by the share of the depth that is withholding.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Released, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the trilogy made the European art film of the 1990s carry metaphysics through colour, music and chance when that cinema was thought exhausted, and it is the fullest statement of the late Kieślowski, though part of the force belongs to Dekalog and Véronique. What holds the axis below the bar is reach: it moved art cinema, not the grammar of film, and network narrative had other sources, among them Altman’s Short Cuts, which shared Blue’s Golden Lion. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Iñárritu and Arriaga’s Amores perros (2000) and 21 Grams (2003); Tykwer’s Heaven (2002) and Tanović’s L’Enfer (2005), from scripts of the trilogy its makers planned next; saturated colour as a structural key in art cinema since; and Preisner’s music performed beyond the film.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across thirty-three years: continuous exhibition in cinemas and on television, restoration and reissue, steady teaching, and Blue and Red regularly among the most admired European films of their decade. The film material is whole. The surface fixed to its moment is larger than in most films of its rank: a concerto for the unification of Europe, the topical project of 1992 and 1993; the gangster capitalism of Warsaw just after communism, on which White’s jokes depend; a scanner on cordless telephones, a technology already gone. These age as history rather than fashion, but they age. What survives is the grief, the revenge and the conscience, which that surface carries rather than constitutes; the concerto’s text is St Paul’s, not a treaty’s.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Three photographers are held to one design: Idziak’s filters and close-ups in Blue, Kłosiński’s grey and white Warsaw, Sobociński’s moving camera and reds in Red, with its long glides through the judge’s house. Preisner’s music is structure: the concerto Blue is about, the tango of White, the bolero of Red. Binoche holds her performance almost wholly in her face; Trintignant’s cynic softens without ever smiling much; Zamachowski plays the clown. The cutting of Blue breaks on the fades, that of Red on near misses across a street, and the sound carries the coffee, the pool, the storm and the telephone lines. The costs: White’s plot runs on convenience, its secondary playing is broad, and the music at times tells the viewer what to feel.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Karol laughing on the rubbish tip, and St Paul’s hymn sung over Julie’s tears. One law covers them. Chance governs all three films; contact comes through an apparatus before it comes face to face, the television, the binoculars and hand signs, the telephone; each protagonist is tested at the bottle bank; each ideal turns against itself before it is redeemed; each film turns on a return from death. The range is three genres, three cities and three photographers, wider than any single film’s, and the law holds across all of it; coherence is weighed by the range it covers, and that is the achievement. What holds the axis at the figure are the strains at the edges: White’s comic physics lets a fortune fall from the sky, and the providence of Red, which saves exactly the trilogy’s couples, is declared at the end.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure. Consciousness: grief in Blue, humiliation and revenge in White, loneliness and conscience in Red. The family: the dead husband and child, a mother who no longer knows her daughter, the mistress’s child, the brothers in Warsaw. Love and sexuality: a marriage dissolved for impotence, the stripper, the betrayals in Red. Labour and money: the salon, the money changers, the model’s work, weather sold by telephone. The law: the divorce court, the judge who reports himself, Auguste’s exam, Dominique’s arrest. Europe, art, technology, the sacred and chance. The triad integrates them across three cities in three countries, so that no one film carries the whole. What holds the axis here: the state and history are emblems more than orders entered, the poor appear only at the edges, and nature is weather.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.1, then The Sublime, The Made and The Inner Law at 9.0. Three forms, each the instrument of what its film knows, gathered on one ferry; elevation reached in grief, farce and romance alike; a making in which three photographers are held to one design, a score is the plot’s object and the cutting carries grief and chance; and one law of chance, apparatus and the ideal turned against itself, from Karol laughing on the tip to St Paul sung over Julie’s tears.
Limiting Dimension
Pressure on Tradition at 8.4: the force is real, but part of it belongs to Dekalog and The Double Life of Véronique, and the documented reach runs into the network narrative of art cinema, which had other sources. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.5, at the bar, since the cycle form and the manner had been proven twice before the trilogy.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis alone: The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.6, The Imperishable at 8.6 and The Swerve at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, the last at the threshold, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis falls below 8.4, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and the aggregate of 8.8 holds the trilogy in Tier IV.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the three films as released, Blue (Bleu, 1993), White (Blanc; in Polish Biały, 1994) and Red (Rouge, 1994), scored as one work under the title Three Colours (Trois couleurs; Trzy kolory): directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, written by Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, with music by Zbigniew Preisner, produced by Marin Karmitz for MK2, and photographed by Sławomir Idziak, Edward Kłosiński and Piotr Sobociński. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Blue and Red are in French, White in Polish with its Paris scenes in French; every axis is judged on the films as made, and no subtitled version is the object or is charged to them. The registers of the Polish dialogue are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. Words are quoted only where they are certain: one line of Karol’s, in Polish, and the opening Greek words of the chorus in Blue. The Double Life of Véronique, the earlier Dekalog, the published screenplays and the films later made from the scripts of the trilogy Kieślowski and Piesiewicz planned next stand outside the unit. Details that could not be verified, among them the running time and the editor of White, the co-producing companies, the schedule of the shoot, the extent of the Corinthians setting and the dates of the restorations, are not given.