MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: NUN THE WISER

Everything about Ida sounds like it was copied verbatim from the Big Book of European Art Film Clichés: full-frame black and white cinematography with emphasis on the whole range of greys, frequently silent people staring mirthlessly and hopelessly at nothing, the Holocaust looms imposingly in the background, and the whole thing is a metaphor for the silence, absence, or death of God. Small wonder that people have fallen over themselves comparing it to the work of Ingmar Bergman, though it's not always the most apt comparison (there's as much Bresson as Bergman, and arguably more Tarkovsky than either of them, and that's just considering the Big 3 "religious torment" art directors of the '60s and '70s).

And if there's nothing about the film that's necessarily fresh, it's indisputably the case that the things the film is up to haven't been done with so much care and artistry and sophistication are things that haven't been done like this in a lot of years. The fifth narrative feature directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, and also the first made in his native Poland, finds him working at a sublimely confident level that blows away even the quiet potency of his outstanding 2004 My Summer of Love, the closest thing he's had to a prominent film prior to now. Ida, to begin with, solves the thorniest of problems, ones that most films of this sort give up on before they even try to start solving it: how can we use this visual medium of ours to dramatise internal struggles? Even without getting into the question of what it's depicting, I'm steadily impressed by how the film depicts things, using heavily off-kilter framings and precise gradations of hue to guide our eyes and explain the emotional relationships between characters, or between characters and the space surrounding them. It's so clear and high-impact that in its 82 minutes, it has more clearly laid out a more complex psychological journey than films twice as long.

A simple story for a powerful but ultimately direct aesthetic: Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is a novice in a Polish convent, sometime in the early 1960s. She is instructed by her Mother Superior (Halina Skoczyńska) that, before she may take her vows, she must meet with her long-lost aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a bitter judge, formerly a model Communist before alcohol and self-loathing took over. With disinterest so objective it can't even be considered cruel, Wanda reveals a truth that burns the girl's sense of self to the ground: Anna was born Ida Lebenstein, the child of Jews who were killed by the Nazis, but were first able to hide their daughter with a kindly Catholic family to save her. Thus begins a sobering, dismal road trip, as Anna/Ida and Wanda travel through Poland to find the last resting place of the Lebensteins, so that both women might be able to say their goodbyes. Do you suppose that painful truths about post-War Poland and the two traveling companions are revealed in this process? And how they are!

The biggest single problem I have with Ida is that it would surely have been more important and powerful if it had been made at the time it was set, or at least by the end of the '70s. As it is, with a half-century between the society it depicts and itself, it feels distinctly safe, one of those We Know Now What We Should Have Then period pieces that's just a smidgen too proud of its own hindsight.

Not much of a complaint, though, against a film as beautiful and rich in human feeling as it is ice cold in its depiction of human weakness. Ida takes place in a cold universe, visually and morally: the grey imagery of Ryszard Lenczewski and Łukasz Żal's cinematography presents a wintery feeling of desolation, while the script that Pawlikowski co-wrote with Rebecca Lenkiewicz tells the familiar story of a post-Holocaust society that wants to deal with the horror in its recent past by blocking out every trace of the past. In Anna's own journey and the doubt it stirs up in her, the film raises grim questions about the possibility of marrying material happiness with spiritual fulfillment; taking this cue, the film literalises this conflict by loading itself full of shots with extraordinary amounts of headspace. These images constantly emphasise the space above Anna, signifying maybe the presence of God, or more caustically (for these are very empty headspaces, most of the time), the vacuum left by the absence of God. Or perhaps it's just a way for the film to suggest the emotional desolation of life rebuilding itself after the War. It works either way, really.

To keep things from getting too airy and conceptual and divorced from human feeling, Ida is lucky to have a pair of absolutely superb performances at its center. Trzebuchowska, playing a young woman's confusion at finding her identity ripped away from her, manages to embody a rather difficult psychological concept perfectly; as a woman who has lived apart from the messy, fleshy part of life, only to find herself now confronted with the world outside the convent in all its enticing scariness, she does exemplary work with rather more conventional but also more humane material. As good as she is, though, Kulesza dominates the frame, both because Wanda is the stronger personality of the two, and because she captures the fatigue and constant low-grade anger and cynicism of her character in blunt, and physically outsized ways that are expressive and theatrical without seeming forced or unnatural (that the film is, itself, in no particular way naturalistic helps this performance to land). It is, absolutely, one of the most commanding, empathetic performances I've seen all year. Between them, the two stars force Ida to remain a film about its characters, not its ideas. But those ideas are still deep and sobering, just as those characters are complex and unpredictable in the best ways, and the film containing them is one of the clear highlights of the movie year.

9/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: WAŁĘSA: MAN OF HOPE (ANDRZEJ WAJDA, POLAND)

Screens at CIFF: 10/11 & 10/13 & 10/16
World premiere: 5 September, 2013, Venice International Film Festival

Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best Actor (Robert Więckiewicz)

My bona fides in disliking the biopic as a cinematic form can hardly be called into question, so the mere fact that I think Wałęsa: Man of Hope is kind of great from the first to the last minute of its more than two-hour running time almost certainly means that "kind of great" is a huge underestimation.

This has nothing to do with the film being a narrative subversion, or anything like that: it couldn't be any more boilerplate if it culminated with the title character's triumphant comeback concert as his soon-to-be-reconciled ex-wife smiles tearfully from the front row. Which, given that Lech Wałęsa (Robert Więckiewicz) was a union and political leader in Communist Poland in the '70s and '80s, would have in fact been pretty tremendously subversive, in fact. The point I'm driving at, though, is that Man of Hope (as I shall call it henceforth, so as not to create confusion between the film and the man) takes unto itself the hoary framing device of an interview, right around the time of the subject's most prominent triumph, that causes him to flash back more than a decade, to the first events on the path that he now walks, recalling along the way the struggles he faced and the personal sacrifices he had to make.

Mind you, the struggles in question are not of the "I got rich and spent it all on heroin" variety, but the "I attempted for most of my adult life to wrest my beloved country away from the totalitarian grip of the Soviet Union, my successes ended up providing a template for the rest of the Soviet satellite nations to stage their own revolutions, and for my efforts I won a Nobel Peace Prize" variety. I believe that's what they call a "qualitative" difference. So Wałęsa is maybe a bit more deserving of the biopic treatment than a lot of people and it helps that Polish filmmaking institution Andrzej Wajda, directing a script by Janusz Głowacki, is less interested in the personal demons driving Wałęsa - of which there seem to be none at all, in this telling, unless "not putting up with bullshit even if the bullshitters are threatening to let you rot to death in prisoner" is a personal demon. In fact Man of Hope is very keenly interested in politics and political morality, subjects that, as an American, I had forgotten that movies could do.

The very short version of what happened in this man's life: an electrician at the Gdańsk shipyards, Wałęsa became involved with the anti-Communist trade unions at his place of work, and as a result was frequently in conflict with his overseers, particularly after he took a leading role in a major strike at those shipyards in 1970. By the middle of the decade, he'd been fired, and looked up to with ever more respect from his colleagues, and in 1980, he was drafted, more or less, to lead another strike in Gdańsk, one that triggered a chain of strikes in multiple industries across the entire country, and represented the moment in which Poland's great trade union Solidarity (with Wałęsa in a leadership role) became a major force in the country's national politics, and from that point to the collapse of Soviet rule in Poland was really just a matter of waiting the bastards out. That plus spending every minute in jail, or with the constant awareness that jail might be just around the corner, because nothing's nastier than a dying police state.

Ultimately, Man of Hope has been made for a Polish audience, and a lot of what happens is presented with a bare minimum of expansive context; place names and dates are tossed around in a casual enough way that if you don't know what's going on - as I did not - the overall shape of the thing isn't crystal-clear. But that's a really hard fault to lay at the movie's feet, when the overall point of the thing isn't to present with nice exactitude what happened (something film implicitly supposes we already know), but to present the up and down feeling of being involved in those events as they played out, experiencing the triumphalism, anger, and concern (don't you dare call it fear - Lech Wałęsa sure doesn't) that accompanied the various victories and setbacks of nonviolent revolution in Poland over some 20 years of chaotic history. The best thing that Wajda does with the material is find a way to combine a historical long view with momentary bursts of feeling, often just in the form of a montage set to one histrionic protest song or another (turns out, and I think I've noticed this before, but maybe not in print, that Poland's political music is, like, explicit in its lyrical intentions), or in a recurrent motif of switching to grainy black and white or noisy videotape at dramatically appropriate moments, the instants when personal action and political history seem to line up most precisely - THIS is the moment that history changed, if we need to pick one.

Primarily, though, Wajda's gift lies in presenting the material swiftly, never letting a moment drag out and never beatifying his characters, and especially in winding up Więckiewicz and letting him go - I wouldn't know Wałęsa from anybody, so I won't vouch for this as a work of mimicry, but as an actor playing a character, Więckiewicz is absolutely terrific. In his hands, Wałęsa is a tart, often disagreeably self-assured bear of a man, the sort of person with a huge frame that seems even bigger because of how confidently he inhabits that frame. He exudes charisma, inviting you to agree with him, and dismissing you in the most jolly way when you disagree; he is a warm life force at all times, even when that kind of vitality is exactly what those around him desperately wish he had less of in the moment. Więckiewicz is playing a garrulous showman, in essence, a Falstaffian character whose boundless enthusiasm and passion and unsophisticated genius are energising for every second that he's onscreen. That, more than anything, is what makes Man of Hope such a triumphant biopic: for all that the subject matter is compelling and well-presented, the joy in watching Więckiewicz roar across the screen devouring his enemies leaves this the most fun movie about the political realities of 1980s Poland that I think any of us are ever likely to see.

8/10

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FRATERNITÉ

After releasing Three Colors: Red in summer 1994, Krzysztof Kieślowski announced that he was done making movies. It took his premature death from a heart attack less than two years later to seal that promise (I am, invariably, dubious about any artist's "retirement" while they are still able-bodied and of sound mind), but even without the inescapable finality of that, Red feels awfully like a for-real final statement, as much as any other director ever put forth. It is a summing-up of both the narrative and moral universes of the Three Colors trilogy, the definitive and stentorian Statement On Europe conceived by Kieślowski and his creative right arm, co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz; it is also the most imposing and total statement of the theme that is, to some degree, the definitive concern of every one of the director's narratives. Namely, that all of us are connected by forces which we cannot perceive, understand, or name; forces which are certainly not "God", as any religion would define that term. Perhaps it is the mystical embodiment of the idea that every human action affects other humans in ways that aren't apparent, and are frequently not noticed. It is tied up with the alternate universes of Blind Chance, it is right on the surface of The Double Life of Véronique, it is buried in the shared universe of the ten chapters of Dekalog. And it is given a particularly robust workout in Red, a movie that is more or less brilliant throughout its running time, but which attains a genuinely hair-raising level of storytelling ingenuity in the film's last scene, probably the most gobsmacking part of Three Colors the first time you watch it, and still potent stuff even after three, four trips through Kieślowski's symbolic Europe.

Even setting aside the "rightness" that the director's final movie should be such a thorough working-out of his pet theme, it makes sense that Red, of all films, would adopt this perspective: in the very loose "liberté, égalité, fraternité" concept that serves as a useful launching point, if nothing else, in carving away at the films, this is the third one, the one that works through the notion of "brotherhood". Though as much as Three Colors: Blue plays with an idiosyncratic notion of "liberty", and Three Colors: White has a positively cynical notion of "equality", Red is certainly the member of the trilogy farthest away from its notional theme as the French revolutionaries would have considered it. In this context, there's absolutely no leftist connotation to "brotherhood", but a humanist one; though even the word "humanist" feels a bit inapt in talking about the exact thing that Red is going on about.

It takes place in Geneva, Switzerland, where student and model Valentine (Irène Jacob) is feeling awfully lonely about the absence of her boyfriend Michel (never seen, but often heard; I believe he is voiced, through the credits are unspecific, by Marc Autheman), though it's anybody's guess as to why: from all available evidence - all the evidence, I say - Michel is a nasty, awful little boy, suspicious at no evidence whatsoever and huffy and contemptuous when Valentine pushes back even slightly against his suspicions. At any rate, Valentine has plenty to occupy her time, such as the photography shoot for chewing gum that finds her wrapping a sweater around her neck and looking off into the middle distance, with an ineffably sad, wounded look on her face.

Clearly, they have different expectations of chewing gum in Switzerland.

One night, Valentine hits a German Shepherd with her car; the dog, Rita, has an address on its collar, and her largely responsible first act (very responsible would be to stop by the vet first) is to go to the owner, a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Later evidence allows us to identify him as a certain Joseph Kern, but in the end credits he is merely "The Judge", and there is a clear intention with which Kieślowski and Piesiewicz present the figure as not merely curmudgeonly ol' Joe Kern, but something more abstract and universal; it seems entirely fair to me to say that he is not just "the judge who appears in the movie", but "the One Who Judges", this being the most deliberately metaphysical of the Three Colors films. Lord, no, he's not a deity - to Kieślowski and Piesiewic, judging isn't a Godly act. The precise opposite: Kern's judgments have proven so implacable and severe that when we meet him, he has descended into total emotional nihilism (he doesn't visibly register any emotion upon hearing that his dog is gravely wounded), and a particularly bent form of nihilism, in which he uses a short-wave radio to eavesdrop on the telephone conversations of his neighbors. Not for any prurient reason, that we can see; apparently it simply gives him a muted form of satisfaction to know for sure that the secret lives of the people he sees during the day are just as venal, selfish, and broken as he wants to imagine. This repulses Valentine, and she storms out.

Naturally enough, she doesn't stay away, and Red plays out like every movie in which a beautiful young woman stirs the inner life of a crusty old man, except not at all like that, in fact. The convention is to call this the anti-romance of the trilogy, in fact, since the possibility of sexual tension between the two characters is so plainly impossible (even the judge himself acknowledges this, plainly, with no pathos); it is also, I do believe, an anti-thriller, as Valentine attempts to unlock the mysteries of this joyless old man and his anti-social actions, but in such a casual, even accidental way that even in the big "let me tell you of my past" scene, what matters is not the fact of the judge's history, but the fact that he's sharing it, now, with Valentine.

Being anti-genre, Red has much more interesting things to do with its plot than just tell a story, and one of the things that makes it so damn incredible to watch (it's the primary reason I often flirt with calling it my favorite of the three, though I almost invariably go back to Blue) is how it's most interested in using plot as a means of expressing theme. For there's another whole narrative thread happening alongside all the stuff I just recapped: in her building, Valentine has a neighbor she's never met, Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit). He's a law student right on the cusp of graduating and becoming a judge himself, and he's in love with Karin (Frédérique Feder), one of the neighbors that Kern spies on - indeed, the Karin/Auguste affair is one of his favorite subjects to haughtily act superior about. Throughout the whole movie, Auguste and Valentine keep almost crossing paths, in a way that would be unabashedly, appallingly contrived if Red were any kind of naturalistic or even honestly representational narrative, which it's not. The film wants us to take Valentine and Auguste as "real" (much like it does with the even more obviously symbolic The Judge), but what happens to them as "not real", representative instead of the human condition of missing connections and not noticing the person around you from moment to moment, even when it's the same person perpetually in the corner of your eye.

The driving energy of Red is coincidence, in its most denotative possible meaning. Things happening at the same time; things overlapping. The film does not posit a God as such (God as such is not typically a very noteworthy figure in Kieślowski's cinema), though it has a guiding intelligence, one directed less at the characters than at the viewers: it's not as important that they understand the unlikely connections drawing their lives together, as it is that we see and recognise them. Red isn't attempting to teach the character lessons about brotherhood, but the viewer. That lesson being, we're all part of the same society, from a sufficient remove, and our lives are all intertwined in ways that, often, nobody will ever notice or care about; but they are intertwined nonetheless. Every beat of the story is built on this precept. There are obvious gestures, like the old woman that Valentine helps with her recycling, after Julie in Blue and Karol in White both ignored her (the fact that the same woman can be in Paris and Geneva for no obvious reason is proof enough that Red cares more about its audience than its cast), a straightforward symbol of Helping Each Other. Or the looming fact of Joseph Kern and Auguste living parallel lives, and in essence living the same life at different moments in time, just like Jacob herself did as Véronique and Weronika three years prior; a great film would have used this as a means of elucidating the character of Kern, or Kern and Auguste, if it was sassy, but Red decides to be more than great, and uses this metaphysical doubling to especially elucidate its themes and emotions, separate from the level of character. The judge never realises that the young man he's so indifferent towards "is" himself; it sounds corny when I type it, but in practice, it surely isn't, any more than it's corny that that having a young version of the judge running around allows the universe (that is, Kieślowski and Piesiewicz) to permit the pairing of the judge and Valentine that he eulogises as having been the one thing that could have saved him from the misanthropy that characterised his whole life.

Red operates largely on the level of metaphor, is what I'm saying. And I took my damn time to say it, but some movies you don't want to let slip by so easily, some trilogies especially. Three Colors is an easy thing to feel, a hard thing to parse, and a damn hard thing to explain, because it operates at such an intuitive level: you watch the film, you immediately comprehend that it is proclaiming that it is a great tragedy of our species that we do not more readily allow ourselves to feel with other people (and this is, in varied iterations, the idea behind each of the films), but the brilliance of the filmmaking and writing is that this happens almost subliminally, through Zbigniew Preisner's wonderful, wonderful music, through the manipulations and repetitions of imagery and the incredibly controlled use of lighting (Red was shot by Piotr Sobociński, incidentally; I would have felt terrible not bringing it up, because it is a neat mingling of the Expressionism of Blue with the realism of White, and the visceral beauty of both), and the way that people have an eerie tendency to feel like themselves and the aspect of 1990s Europe that they represent. From its hugely symbolic opening telephone call (we track along and occasionally inside the the wires connecting a phone in England and a phone in Geneva - phones being one of the main motifs in this most motivistic of films) to its even more symbolic final scene (where a terrible tragedy unites the various Embodied Aspects of Europe the trilogy has devised into one place and moment), Red wants more than anything to be Kieślowski ultimate, comprehensive statement on how life works at that one moment in history, what the human cost of that moment is, and how we might be able to be our best selves and make that place at that moment unified and well. It's nothing short of astonishing that the director was actually able to carry such a thing off, and no better swan song to such a rich, weighty career has yet been filmed.

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ÉGALITÉ

Conventional wisdom holds that Three Colors: White is the least among the Three Colors trilogy, and I guess that I agree with that assessment. I suppose that it's possible to have a least-favorite panel of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, too, and about as useful to the field of arts criticism.

The particular reasons that White is the obvious outlier - irrespective of any considerations of quality - are obvious. It is, for starters, the most overtly "Polish" movie of the three films conceived by director Krzysztof Kieślowski and lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz: Three Colors: Blue is very cozily nestled into the tradition of slow-moving Western European art film that it helped to kick of in the '90s, with its oblique narrative, pointed absence of dialogue, and obfuscatory cutting, while Three Colors: Red has a more geographically free sense of character and mysticism that nevertheless feels just about right when presented in French. White, though is gritty and rough and "realistic", certainly more realistic than anything Kieślowski made after Dekalog, his ten-part epic about the death throes of Communist Poland. The lush, richly Expressionist images of those films are replaced here with cinematographer Edward Kłosiński's dementedly bleached-out landscapes and grainy docu-style interiors. It even sounds more Polish: where Zbigniew Preisner's Blue score roars with Germanic-laced choruses and dramatic percussion, and his main theme for Red is a sinuous, Romantic-flavored bolero, White is dominated by a string-driven tango with an ironic cynicism behind it that feels indefinitely but unmistakably Eastern European.

Setting that aside, but only just for a moment, White is also the only member of Three Colors to take a male protagonist, Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), and uniquely for a Kieślowski picture, its headlining woman is something of an ill-defined blank slate: Karol's French ex-wife Dominique (Julie Delpy), who surely appears in less than a third of the 90-minute movie, overall, and has no discernible inner life, a shocking omission for a director whose women are generally among the most complex and interesting in '80s and '90s cinema, stretching easily as far back as 1985's No End. This is, I think, a big part of the reason that White is not as universally-beloved as the films flanking it, and certainly, the excessively male-gazey way that Dominique is used in the narrative structure galls; though it is also mostly if not completely justified by the scenario, which does, after all, adopt Karol's perspective as much as Blue adopts Julie's. And to Karol, Dominique is not merely an Other, she is The Other, the symbol of all the things he longs for and completely fails to comprehend or understand.

Which brings me to the other thing that separates White from the other colors, which is that it's the most openly political film in the trilogy. And maybe I should put "political" in scare quotes, for even here, the film isn't as deeply and exactingly engaged with the nature of politics as any of Kieślowski's great Polish films (this is, by far, the most common criticism of the director's French period, by those who prefer his earlier films to his last four), which were made in Soviet-occupied Poland and without ever being preachy, moralist tales were inherently and obsessively about Soviet occupation. White, of course, was made and release after the fall of the Soviet Union, and in a certain fashion, it's apolitical politics are a direct response to that event; I feel that Kieślowski and Piesiewicz were arguing that post-Communist Poland is itself deliberately un-political, in the way that you have to work awfully hard to achieve, and in this, their most cynical film, the filmmakers are pulling this willful political agnosticism into the fiber of their story.

Not that you can divorce politics from the thing completely. For very much like Blue (not as much like Red), the central narrative is at once a deep and resonant character study and a metaphor for post-Cold War Europe at one and the same time, and you cannot take one away without ruining the other. Karol, we are given to understand, has lived in France since before Poland's liberation, and it was here that he fell in love with Dominique and married her; as the story begins, she has tired of their sexless (indeed, unconsummated!) marriage, and wants to divorce him. The francophonic courts are not at all kind to the Polish-speaking Karol, who finds himself dispossessed of his belongings and his citizenship, reduced to begging in the Métro. Here he meets successful Polish businessman Mikołaj (Janusz Gajos), who offers to smuggle him back to Poland on one condition: Karol must kill a man who wishes to commit suicide, but cannot do so for fear that it will overly traumatise his wife and children.

Karol sneaks his way back in, hidden in a large suitcase; this is stolen at the airport, and the ex-patriate's return home consists of being rolled onto the frozen ground, into a garbage dump. "Frozen garbage dump" is a visual shorthand that persists for basically the rest of the film; Kieślowski and Kłosiński are not afraid to depict their native country in two and only two flavors, one being "dead of winter", the other "waning decrepitude of late autumn". The color white, naturally enough, dominates White, and that mostly comes in the form of washed-out landscapes, washed-out people, and washed-out life. It is a bleak movie if ever one was made.

Naturally enough, this is the comedy of the trio, though a comedy which the writers carefully and deliberately stripped of any humor. White goes on from Karol's homecoming to tell of his rise in the shadowy neo-capitalism that has replaced communism in Poland when democracy wasn't looking, and his ultimate desire to use his fortune solely to get back at Dominique, through fairly arcane and frankly cruel means. And here's where the politics come back in, because you'd have to be particularly unimaginative to miss how "Karol" and "Dominique" could be readily replaced by "Poland" and "Western Europe", and just like that, White becomes a fable about the re-absorption of the former Soviet Bloc states into the European community that was so pridefully birthing itself in the background of Blue. Kieślowski and Piesiewicz are far too intelligent and far too reluctant to make a simple political satire to permit this as the only reading of the film, of course, even the dominant one. But the bitterness that courses through the entire film - a Pole demanding respect from France, and, failing to get it, using underhanded means to get back at the French person that most humiliated him - demands that we connect it to larger social currents than just this one story of one man's revenge.

In the revolutionary credo motif that nominally provides Three Colors with its structure, White is "equality", but a particularly ironic form of equality it is; it's exactly the same kind embodied in the famous Animal Farm line that "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others", a reality of life under Soviet rule that the creators of the film were assuredly familiar with. Equality, for Karol, is not about receiving the same respect and rights as anyone else - though it starts off that way, in the opening courtroom sequence - but about being equal enough to crush the other fella. The implication being that this, in a newly-freed Poland, is what is being idealised: not humanitarianism, but selfishness, not true equality, but being the most equal among all your friends. As with Blue, the plot of the film largely hinges on the protagonist being restored to his basic, decent humanity after giving taking a noble idea ("liberty", "equality") and corrupting it; though in White, the restorative scene was only added after the fact, as Kieślowski was concerned (rightly) that the film ended on too sour a note, and left Dominique too empty a figure.

But here I am, going on and on, doing exactly thing I want not to do: reducing White to a singular scheme. If it's not quite as obscure as the other two films, it's undeniably complex and layered, and far from telling just a simple story of one man with a big heart turning to great before returning to humanism, it's a beautifully abstract study of identity in a quickly-changing world. It has its share of symbolism, mostly in a lengthy chain of doublings: Karol Karol's very name, which is echoed throughout the movie in a pair of corpses, a pair of pseudo-resurrections, a pair of brothers (Karol's brother Jurek is played by Jerzy Stuhr, who also played his brother in Dekalog 10), two meager francs that are Karol's whole fortune in the world. It is a film of pairs, her and me, the past and the present, Western and Eastern Europe, and the challenge to the characters lies in finding a unified self in the face of all this doubling.

In the end, of White is the most apparently straightforward of the Three Colors, visually, thematically, and narratively, it's still profound and challenging in its own right, and literally the only reason I can think of to call it straightforward or simple at all is in connection with the other two films in its series. And even that is a superficial take on a movie that, from head to toe, is as probing and meaningful as any arthouse hit of the '90s, lacking only the drama and mystical qualities of Blue and Red to overtly flag itself as such.

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LIBERTÉ

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the premiere of the first part of cinema's all-time greatest trilogy. Let us joyfully celebrate this event in the only way I know how: marathon time!

The first thing one must not do with swan song of the great Krzysztof Kieślowski, Three Colors, is to reduce it to a simple puzzle of symbolism. This is something one really must not do with a great many films, of course, but in the case of Three Colors, the temptation is unusually high, given how openly the concept of the film trilogy announces itself as eager to be read schematically. The title refers to the French flag, with the traditional reading of the blue, white, and red banner as representing the three legs of the motto of the French revolution, "liberté, égalité, fraternité", "liberty, equality, brotherhood", and those three adjectives map onto the three films, more or less. But there's more to it than that.

Even if we avoid the desire to peg Three Colors: Blue as simply, "the film about liberty", the film itself suggests an equally reductive reading. For the other thing Three Colors is clearly About, besides the revolutionary motto, is the state of Europe after the collapse of the Soviet empire, and Blue is a movie all about European unification in the early '90s. The plot, such as it is, hinges on the composition of a theme to be played in twelve countries simultaneously, an anthem for European unity, and the main character spends most of the film trying very hard and failing to have nothing to do with this theme at all. It is plainly the case, then, that Kieślowski and indispensible co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz want for their drama to be a symbolic study of the upheavals of identity facing the new Europe of 1993, but there's more to it than that, as well.

For Blue is also, simply, a great, haunting character study of Julie de Courcy (Juliette Binoche), survivor of a film-opening car accident that kills her husband, the much-beloved composer Patrice de Courcy, and their daughter Anna. This event is what gives her the liberty promised by Kieślowski and Piesiewicz's concept, which should be enough to tell you right there why reducing Three Colors to the liberté etc. framework isn't as useful as you'd maybe like it to be. What liberty means, to Julie, is the freedom from having a past or pre-established personality: the first thing she does after finding that she's too scared to commit suicide in the hospital is to sell off every scrap of property she owned or was left by Patrice, except for a single knick-knack, a chandelier made up of clear blue beads, which is hung in her new apartment.

And there's more to the film than that, too. What makes Blue brilliant - like what makes Three Colors: White and Three Colors: Red brilliant, and to be blunt about it, what makes every Kieślowski film I've seen brilliant, though especially the ones he made with Piesiewicz - is how the film seems to announce itself so plainly, with every beat of every scene clearly telegraphing what it wants to communicate thematically and narratively and spiritually (yes! spiritually! It's not really possible to discuss this director's filmography without being willing to admit that his films are among the most spiritual, though not at all religious, in cinema), the most obvious thing in the world; and yet for all that it is feels entirely straightforward in the moment of watching it, the second you try to explain it or codify it... it's simply not there any more. Blue can be a movie about liberty, about Europe in and of itself, and as metaphorically filtered through a battered woman putting herself back together, and it can be a character study to, and it can also be about, naturally enough, the color blue, and the way that human perception tends to focus on things we want to see or want specifically not to see, like if I say right now, "don't notice the blue things around you", and you look around, I can just about guarantee that blue things are all you will notice.

"They have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them", Stanley Kubrick said of Kieślowski and Piesiewicz, and I suppose that's what I'm talking about, really. Blue is an intuitive film: it could not be any less schematic if it tried, no matter how much it feels, in describing it, like it's nothing but one schema on top of another.

Anyway, let's return to Julie where we left her, attempting to entirely erase the memory of Julie de Courcy, taking back her maiden name Vignon and refusing to speak in public or private about the "Song for the Unification of Europe" that Patrice left unfinished at his death (and which Julie tries to leave even more unfinished, throwing what she mistakenly believes to be the only copy into a garbage truck). View this only in the outline, you might be so bold as to call it feminism, but there's nothing like that at all - Julie's actions are not affirmative and thus feminist, but negative: this is a film about a woman trying to eradicate feelings, inner life, human connection. Binoche is magnificent in the role, giving not merely the best performance of her career but one of the best ever put to film, crafting a stone-faced edifice that looks like uncaring, unfeeling, inexpressiveness, but Binoche carefully puts just enough of a crack in that perfectly smooth, unknowable face in the moments where she thinks nobody is watching, or when she's caught off guard, that we in the film audience understand that something is going on at a deep level in there. By all means, Julie exits the movie as someone we only barely understand, but not because she is vague. It's because at the end of the movie, she finally really is able to use her newfound freedom to reinvent herself - not as a reactive, inhuman figure of detachment and insulation, but as a newborn, full of all possibilities. Y'know, like a newly unified Europe, but I really did promise myself that I wasn't going to spend too much time on the politically metaphorical elements of the film.

The all-encompassing question of what's going on in Julie's mind in the final shot of the film is thus left quite unanswerable, much like the big narrative ellipsis as to whether Julie, and not Patrice, was actually responsible for the composition of "Song for the Unification of Europe"; but for a film that does its absolute damnedest to leave nothing resolved - it is the most elliptical of the Three Colors films, almost as deliberately vague as what I tend to think of as the Three Colors apprentice film, The Double Life of Véronique - Blue reveals quite a lot. It just doesn't do it in the context of narrative, but of character psychology and character emotion, things that are expressed through Binoche's performance, as well as the filmmakers' at times somewhat pushy formalism. Blue is an especially visual and aural experience even by the standards of a directorial career that's rather heavy on visual communication, as Kubrick pointed out. There is, for example, the repeated trick (it is used four times, always with profound significance) of fading to black and letting the score, composed by the incomparable Zbigniew Preisner on Patrice and Julie's behalf soar up and belt us right in the face. It's not a hugely sophisticated trick - it represents the four moments when Julie is most taken aback and forced to confront her emotions without a chance to secure herself in a layer of protective detachment - but it doesn't have to be sophisticated when it works so incredibly well. And it does that, oh so much.

The title of the film itself points us to what's going on in the visuals, the last of three collaborations between Kieślowski and Sławomir Idziak, who goes right on ahead and makes the entire movie feel blue - a chilly color in this rendering, rather than a depressive one, but the film doesn't rely on what the audience thinks of the color, anyway. What matter is what Julie thinks of the color, and this is communicated to us implicitly, silently: it is the color she associates with her dead family, and the color she attempts to reclaim (explicitly in the form of that blue chandelier, the only object we see her attack, and the only object she takes with her). It is the color she sees or feels, if you can be said to feel a color, in the same moments that she hears the Song echoing in her head (the movie neatly presents its non-diegetic score as entirely contained in the protagonist's mind), when she is least able to banish feeling and identity and humanity. In the end, when she actively decides to rejoin the human race, she is wearing - barely visible, you can only see the cuffs - a blue shirt, and after both fighting and attempting to dominate the color, she finally gives into it.

Blue, the color, thus represents liberty and the renunciation of liberty, at least as it's defined here, as the freedom from obligation but also, necessarily, freedom from connectivity. But anti- things are common in Three Colors, the films of which are commonly described as anti-tragedy, anti-comedy, and anti-romance, respectively. Anti-tragedy certainly fits Blue: it is theoretically about a sad event that wounds a woman, but the entire action of the film lies in Julie's act of rising out of tragedy and misery (and what is the stone-faced attempt to squash all misery by feeling nothing at all, but a complete and unconditional surrender to being miserable?), using bereavement to refocus herself. The plot describes letting go and facing forward, building new things and not harboring pain (dramatised as Julie throwing herself into the act of composition, while giving a home to her husband's mistress, the person she hates most). It is about the act of deciding what you want to write on a blank slate: the first time we see Binoche's face, is immediately after learning that Julie is now widowed; she is introduced to us as a person who has just been untied from her past self. Blue is, then, the story of how to become a new, better, more whole self, whether as a single person or an entire continent, and learning how to prevent past trauma from infecting the present. There is nothing less tragic than that.

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