By Raymond Benson
It’s
one of the best trilogies ever put on celluloid. Period.
This
trio of films by the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski can be
ambiguously described by these adjectives: insightful, enigmatic, mysterious, melancholic, personal, beautiful,
ironic, allegorical, and colorful.
Art
house cinema movie-goers are most likely well familiar with these works,
initially released in 1993 and 1994. Kieslowski was a preeminent filmmaker working since the 1970s behind the
Iron Curtain and was relatively unknown to the West until the fall of the
Soviet Union in 1989. Then, a flood of
previous entries in his oeuvre amazed
and challenged a new worldwide audience. His ten-part Polish television series from 1988, The Decalogue, became one of the most celebrated events in media. Now
free to work where he wished and make what he wanted, Kieslowski moved to
France and received funding for more ambitious projects such as The Double Life of Veronique (1991), a
co-French and co-Polish production. This
same configuration resulted in his masterpiece, the Three Colors trilogy of Blue,
White, and Red. The accolades and awards
were promptly showered on these unique films, and they were well deserved.
Kieslowski
is a filmmaker who likes to take a general concept, say, the “Ten
Commandments,†and then turn it upside down and examine it from a modern perspective. The
Decalogue did this by presenting the theme of each commandment re-imagined
in a modern context full of double meanings, coincidences, and irony. With his co-screenwriter, Krzysztof
Piesiewicz, he did the same in Three
Colors, which loosely examines the tenets behind the colors of the French
national flag—liberty, equality, and fraternity.