Valentine (Irène Jacob) is a model and dancer whose boyfriend she has to keep in contact with by telephone these days as he travels Europe on business, but he calls her every day, possibly to possessively keep a check on her movements more than because he is truly passionate about her in a loving manner. She doesn't mind and likes the attention, but at the moment her life doesn't have many other strong relationships as everyone around her is either kept unintentionally at phone line's length, or those she encounters briefly during her day. But then she runs over a dog in her car...
Which is the trigger for an intense experience when she reads the name on the collar and tracks the hound's owner to a quiet area of the city, something which causes Valentine to re-evaluate her connections to the world at large. That's down to the theme of Three Colours: Red, or Trois Couleurs: Rouge being the third part of the French flag, which was fraternity, after the previous films had tackled liberty and equality, and as the work its director Krzysztof Kieslowski (who scripted with regular collaborator Krzysztof Piesiewicz) which he announced would be his last, this got a lot of attention.
He died before he could reconsider his retirement, which for his fans made Red all the more precious, though for others that sense of a jaded old man attempting to make a statement about more sincere feelings than his stories could stand was hard to shake. The other main character in this was the retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who is the owner of the dog Valentine runs over, but when she arrives at his home she finds the door open and wanders in. There she realises that the man spends his days listening in on his neighbour's telephone conversations, all to bolster his belief that people are essentially, if not evil, then far less laudable than we like to think.
Valentine is of the opposite opinion, yet as Kieslowski depicted her as a rather naive young woman who was not clear in her own mind about the big questions of life, we see her as shallow and the judge's cynicism as the correct way to regard his felllow human beings. This state of affairs does not continue or it wouldn't be much of a story, but those early scenes where the girl confronts him and cannot come up with anything but vague reasons why people are essentially good tended to overpower the later, redemptive ones. By secretly observing others and finding them lacking, the judge has simply carried on in the job that he left, only this time illegally.
So he's not much better than those he is scrutinising - if anything, Valentine realises he is far worse, but she brings him out of his shell over the course of the rest of the film and to confront his issues. This is meant to be uplifting, but that wasn't really what Kieslowski did too well, and such bits and pieces as Valentine being the one to finally help an elderly woman to put a bottle in a recycling bank don't quite stem the tide of the director's rather waspish view of humanity. It's as if, watching this, he was trying to convince himself that we were all better than he thought, that the fraternity of his themes was genuine, leaving the careful, glowing visuals as artificial as the sentiment. You can't say he didn't try, as the characters from all three films are brought together for a coda to symbolise that we're all in this together, but did feature some footage employed in dubious taste of an actual disaster to illustrate it. The Three Colours trilogy was quite an achievement in sustained style, but rather aloof in its attempts to appeal to the heart as well as the head. Music by Zbigniew Preisner.
[Artificial Eye's Blu-ray box set features all three films in pristine prints, along with a number of interviews, making ofs and a masterclass as extras to fill in the background to these arthouse favourites.]
