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Krzysztof Kieslowski (Warsaw, 1941)
Personel/ Personnel (1975)
Blizna/ The Scar (1976):
un dirigente onesto e intelligente combatte burocrati
ottusi e cittadini reticenti per costruire un'importante fabbrica.
Przypadek/ Blind Chance (1977), unreleased till 1987,
Cineamatore (1980): un cineasta oppresso si autocensura
chiudendosi nel privato.
Bez Konca/ No End/ Senza Fine (1984): un morto racconta di essere stato avvocato
difensore di un operaio di Solidarnosc, ossessivo e pauroso.
Dekalog/ Decalogue (1988) is a set of ten films that examine the decline
of morality in Poland.
For example,
Krotki film o Zabijaniu/ Short Film About Love: un giovane sbandato
viene uccide un tassista disgustoso che viene difeso al processo da un
fervente avvocato. Film violento e disperato.
La Double Vie de Veronique/ The Double Life of Veronica (1991)
Veronika is a young and beautiful woman who is going through an important
stage of her life. She has her first lover, and tells her aunt, with whom
she lives. She is a fantastic singer and wins an important contest.
One day, while she is walking back home through a student demonstration,
she sees a bus of tourists, and a woman who likes like herself taking pictures.
During her first official recital, Veronika collapses and dies.
A young and beautiful French woman, Veronique, who looks exactly like Veronika,
is also having her first sexual experience. She is the tourist who took a
picture of Veronika, but clearly did not notice her. The two women are briefly
in the same place at the same time, but are otherwise unrelated.
Veronique is also a promising singer, but decides to quit her singing lessons.
One day she sees a puppeteer perform and is fascinated by the story.
In the meantime, somehow has been stalking her.
The stalker sends her puzzles, as if to test her intelligence, and one day
he simply sends her a tape with the recording of noises from a train station.
Veronique, intrigued, is smart enough to find out in which station and in
which bar the tape was made, and goes there. He is there waiting for her.
The stalker is the puppeteer. But Veronique is hurt when he tells her the
reason of his experiment: he wants to write a novel about a situation like
this. Veronique runs away and hides in a hotel, but he finds her, and she
lets him sleep in her room. In the morning, he looks her pictures and sees the
picture of Veronika, that Veronique has never noticed. Veronique starts crying,
and the puppeteer starts kissing her and making love to her.
The following day, he makes two puppets that look like Veronique, and writes
a story about two girls born on the same day and the way one could feel what
was happening to the other.
The "Three Colors" trilogy (representing liberty, equality and fraternity)
started with Blue/ Bleu (1993), a slow drill into a devastated
female psyche.
A little girl holds a candy outside the window of a car. There is a leak under
the car. The car crashes. The girl and the driver (her father) die.
Her mother, Julie, survives (although she tries to commit suicide when she
realizes what happened). The man was a famous husband, and the tv shows
the funeral. The media are also abuzz with gossip that she was writing his
compositions. A journalist asks her about the much-talked about concerto
that her husband was said to be working on: she denies it ever existed.
(The style of narration gets increasingly focused and linear
as she recovers from the wounds and begins to cope with grief).
Finally, Julie takes action. She drives to the country home, and orders
that everything be sold and everybody taken care of.
She refuses to say why. She gets rid of all memories, and throws away her
husband's last unfinished scores.
Then she leaves. She has decided to destroy her identity.
She even makes love to Olivier, her husband's assistant who has silently
loved her for years and has come to comfort her.
She then moves to Paris and rents an apartment under another name.
In the middle of the night she sees a kid beaten by other kids.
She spends her days doing nothing, just trying to forget, not to think.
She has chosen an anonymous loneliness, but the pain is still there, haunting
her (a boy returns a necklace he stole from the site of the accident and
tells her that her husband was still alive).
Olivier finds her but she is totally indifferent towards him.
She doesn't seem to get the peace she is craving for: her apartment is
infested with mice that keep her awake at night.
She visits her mother, who lives in a house for the elderly and
is losing her mind and has nothing to do all day.
Her neighbor Lucille, a prostitute and stripper, is her only friend.
While visiting her at the strip-tease club,
she sees on tv Olivier who explains how he rescued her husband's last
concerto and is working on finishing it. The tv shows images of Julie
over and over again.
She learns from Olivier that her husband had a lover, for several years.
Julie decides to visit her. Sandrine is a lawyer. And she has just found
out of being pregnant of the dead man.
(When Julie enters the tribunal, the character pleading his innocence is
the protagonist of the next part of the trilogy).
Driven by life back to her past, she decides to help Olivier finish the score.
It soon becomes obvious to Olivier that Julie is a first-rate composer,
and therefore the gossip was true: she was the real composer. And her
husband cheated on her while she made him a star.
Thus Olivier tells Julie that she has to reveal the truth.
She brings him the score and makes love to him, but this time she feels.
She is alive again. As they make love, she thinks of
the boy who found the necklace, her mother, Sandrine's belly... and then
she cries. Her tears are the last scene.
Colors tell a story of their own.
Blue, in general, seems to refer to her past.
Red seems to be the future, or at least far from her past.
Bialy/ Blanc/ White (1993), vastly inferior to Blue, is more of a comedy
than a tragedy. Explicitly inspired by Chaplin's City Lights,
it loses in character analysis what it gains in plot dynamics.
In fact, the movie is more successful as a parody of capitalist Poland than as
a psychological drama of a humiliated man.
In a Parisian tribunal,
a young, attractive and vicious French wife, Dominique, obtains a divorce
from her Polish husband Karol, on the grounds that his is impotent.
(For a second we see Julie from the previous movie enter the courtroom).
Karol is devastated.
Dominique is cruel and brutal. Determined to finish him off,
she closes their bank account, cancels his credit cards,
humilaties him sexually one more time,
and frames him for setting fire on the hairdressing salon that they shared.
He has to hide in the subway and beg for money playing a pocket comb.
Dominique has no mercy for him (she has an orgasm while he is listening
on the phone).
His only belonging is a large suitcase that he carries around.
A fellow Pole befriends him and helps him get back to Poland by smuggling him
on a plane in the suitcase. But the suitcase is stolen at the airport. When
the thieves open the suitcase and find a man in it, they beat him (he's
jacket is made in Russia) and leave him for dead in the snow. However, Karol
is happy to be home. He takes his suitcase and walks to his brother's place.
(These scenes of his return to Poland are quiet comic, as if the director
if making fun of his own country).
He is still dreaming of Dominique, but also has to find a job, while helping
his brother in their salon.
Hired as the bodyguard of an unprincipled capitalist,
he quickly understands how to make money in his chaotic country: he overhears
the capitalist plan to buy a land and buys it before him.
The very man who helped in Paris pays him to kill him: Karol shoots him with
a blank and the man still pays him.
When he finds out that he doublecrossed him,
the capitalist almost kills him, but Karol has written a will that will assign
the land to the church when he dies, a will that in catholic Poland is like
a life insurance.
The capitalist is forced to buy the land from him for ten times what he paid.
Soon, Karol becomes as heartless and greedy as the worst of the new capitalists
But Karol is still obsessed with Dominique. He calls her and she hangs up.
Karol come sup with a scheme to bring her to Poland: he rewrites his will
to leave her everything and then fakes his own death. Dominique flies to
Poland and cries at his funeral.
Then he waits for her in bed. She is surpised but hardly shocked.
The two make love and she has the orgasm of her life.
Now she loves him, but he disappears. He has planned his revenge by tipping
the police that his own death may have not been natural and that one person
had an obvious motive:
the police arrests Dominique for the homicide of Karol, and, of course,
they do not believe that Karol is alive.
Now Dominique experiences what Karol felt: in love, betrayed, humiliated,
ruined.
Now Dominique is in jail. Karol looks at her with a binocular and cries.
Rouge/Red (1994), possibly the best of the trilogy, seems to be a
metaphor about the difficulty of communicating.
There is an existentialist undercurrent that connects the three films and
the entire work of the director.
The lives of these characters are constrained to the point that very little
seems to happen. They mostly "are", just are.
The stories simply prime and test their existence and may cause tiny fluctuations
that eventually create big waves.
It is also a highly romantic ending to the trilogy, but not of the kind
that begins with sex and ends with eternal love. This romance is about a
friendship between a young lonely woman and an old isolated man. Zieslowski
removes sex from the equation.
There are echoes of Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, despite the fact
that this film is not about art but about life.
In the theater, they indulge in the same melancholy of contemplating the
impossibility of fulfilling their bond, the ineluctable forces of life that pull them apart.
It is also, and perhaps above all, another meditation on fate.
It is an essay on coincidence. A life is but a series of coincidences. The slightest events can have lifetime-long consequences.
In some weird way, this film is also a postmodernist act of genre revisionism:
Red defuses romance the same way Blue defused melodrama and White defused comedy.
Like the other chapters of the trilogy, it is probably also a solemn parable
for some profound meaning: but their parables are not easy to decipher.
The symbolism of the colors and of the characters is murky, fuzzy, loose.
The judge might be a metaphor for the director himself. The woman might be
a metaphor for the muse, or art itself.
After all, the judge
plays the role of God, but a God who is a mere witness, who knows
everything, but can't do anything (or doesn't want to do anything) to
change the world.
A girl calls her boyfriend, who is far away. They rarely see each other.
At the same time, the phone rings in a nearby apartment: Auguste, a law
student who has a dog, picks up the phone and talks to his girlfriend.
At night,
Valentine, an attractive fashion model, runs over a dog, and, feeling guilty,
she drives to the address she finds on the collar. The owner of the dog is
an old man who seems to live alone in an apartment with the door open.
He is indifferent to the news and refuses the dog. She takes the dog to
a veterinarian (who tells her the dog is pregnant) and adopt it.
She wins money at a slot machine and receives a cheque that she was not
expecting. But the day is ruined by an article in the newspaper about drug
addicts: the picture is of her brother's.
She asks someone (Marie) to leave a message for Marc to call her back.
She takes the dog to the park but the dog runs away, first into a church,
and then disappears. She guesses that the dog must have returned home,
and in fact finds him with the old man. The cheque was for him, to pay
for the veterinarian. But he doesn't want the dog: it's hers to take.
She gets a chance to wander around the house and finds out that the old man
is an odd pervert who has built a sophisticated device to listen into
his neighbords' telephone conversations. She hears a man talk to his lover.
She is disgusted, but the old man doesn't seem embarrassed at all. He challenges
her to go and tell the neighbor. She walks straight out determined to do just
that. The wife lets her in and tells her that her husband is on the phone.
Again, Valentine wanders around the house and so sees their daughter, who
is eavesdropping her dad's love conversation. Valentine finds an excuse
and walks out of the house, possibly afraid of doing more harm than good,
or embarrassed that the little girl already knows about her dad's love affair.
Valentine returns to the old man's house and confronts him. He is not ashamed:
his hobby doesn't do any harm, and doesn't change the course of events.
He used to be a judge and never knew what was the truth. Now at least he,
Joseph, knows the truth about everything that happens in his neighborhood.
Valentine seems shocked: she can relate the old man's cynicism to a young
friend, someone who discovered he was not his father's son. The judge guesses
that she is talking about her brother, and that her brother must have
become a junkie. She says she pities the old man,
but maybe she is also fascinated by how well he knows mankind.
Back home, she calls her mother and learns that her brother is visiting her.
Valentine talks to Marc, but Marc is just like the old man: indifferent
and cynical. He hangs up without even letting her finish her comments on
the newspaper's article.
As she stares at the telephone, she begs Michel to call.
Instead, Jacques the photographer calls. Her (very red) billboard is already all over town.
Michel calls at night. He is arrogant, insulting, jealous. She hangs up, hurt.
Valentine's phone calls are a source of unhappiness, in contrast to the old
man, who lives isolated, doesn't have friends, doesn't receive calls, but
listens to how phone calls affect other people's lives.
Auguste, the law student who lives near Valentine, walks out of the university
building with a smile, welcomed by
his girlfriend: he just graduated to become a judge.
(The girlfriend asks him if they asked him the question he read in the book that
he had dropped, but he doesn't seem to understand).
The retired judge, Joseph,
is staring at him: the young man is beginning the life that the judge just
ended.
While working out at the gym, Valentine reads another article in the newspaper:
someone found out about the judge who spies on his neighbords. She drives to
Joseph and swears she didn't tell a soul: he believes her because... he is the
one who has written to the newspaper (and to all the neighbors).
And he did so because she asked him to.
As they chat, he mentions the young couple. It turns out Auguste and his girlfriend are among the couples that the judge was spying on. He seems sure that
they will break up.
But the judge is mainly interested in the concept of justice, in the guilty
people who are set free and the innocents who are sentenced as guilty.
He has been hardened by his job, as if he never encountered humanity.
In the meantime, August has been trying in vain to call his girlfriend.
He takes the car and drives to her place. She doesn't answer the door. He
climbs the building to her apartment, and sees her in the middle of sex with
another man.
Valentine makes plans to visit Michel in England. She clearly misses him,
but he doesn't sound excited. Downstairs, Auguste parks his car and walks
back to his apartment in a suicidal mood.
Auguste ties his dog to a pole and leaves.
Valentine invites the judge to a fashion defile', and he shows up, remaining
in the empty theater after the audience has already left.
He tells her the story of when, a young student, he was in that theater and
had dropped a book from the balcony: when he found the book, it was open at
a certain page, and he read a few lines, and it turned out that was precisely
the question they asked him at the exam. (This is the story that
Auguste's girlfriend referred to: it turns out it happened in another life).
A violent storm is slamming doors and opening windows in the theater.
This time it is her turn to guess: she understands that he has been tormented
all his life by the memory of the woman he loved, a woman who betrayed him.
(Just like Auguste has just been betrayed by his girlfriend and can't find
peace). He was never able to forget, because he never met another woman whom
he could love. And he adds "Maybe you are the woman I never met".
Later in life, Joseph had a chance to take his revenge: he presided the trial
of the very man who stole his fiance', and convicted him. Then he retired.
Thus ends the story of Joseph's life.
Before leaving Valentine at the theater, he checks her ticket: it is red.
Valentine boards the ferry to England. By accident, Auguste is on the
same ferry. They have never met in the city where they live, but they
are now on the same boat. Workers take down Valentine's giant billboard from
the wall, while the storm begins to blow again.
The following day Joseph reads the newspaper: the ferry sank, but a few people
survived: Julie and Olivier of Bleu,
Karol and Dominique of Blanc, and Valentine and Auguste
of Rouge (the picture of Valentine on tv is exactly like the one in
the red billboard). The first two are already couples. Valentine and Auguste
don't know yet that they are going to be a couple.
This is where the symmetry between Joseph's life and Auguste ends: Auguste
does find the woman whom Joseph never met. At the same time, the two lives
are now identical: Auguste meets the woman whom Joseph finally met after
waiting all his life.
Krzysztof Kieslowski, who had declared he would never direct a film again,
died in march 1996.
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(Translation by/ Tradotto da Alessandra Biasi)
White (1993), ampiamente inferiore rispetto a Blue, e` piu` una
commedia che una tragedia. Esplicitamente ispirato al City Lights di
Chaplin, perde nell`analisi dei caratteri quello che guadagna nella
dinamicita` dell`intreccio. Di fatto, il film e` meglio riuscito come
parodia della Polonia capitalista piuttosto che come dramma psicologico
di un uomo umiliato.
In un tribunale parigino, Dominique, una giovane, attraente e viziosa
moglie francese, ottiene il divorzio da Karol, il marito polacco,
adducendo come causa l`impotenza di quest`ultimo. Karol e` disperato.
Dominique e` crudele e brutale. Determinata a dargli il colpo di
grazia, chiude il conto in banca comune, cancella la carta di credito
di Karol, continua a umiliarlo sessualmente e lo incolpa di aver dato
fuoco al negozio di coiffeurs di loro proprieta`. Karol deve
nascondersi nella metropolitana e chiedere denaro suonando un pettine
tascabile.
Dominique non ha pieta` di lui (ha un orgasmo mentre lui sta ascoltando
al telefono). Gli unici effetti personali di Karol sono in una grande
valigia che si porta dietro. Un compagno Polacco gli da` una mano e lo
aiuta a tornare in Polonia facendolo salire in un aereo nascosto in una
valigia. Ma la valigia viene rubata in aeroporto. Quando i ladri aprono
la valigia e vi trovano un uomo, lo picchiano (la sua giacca e` "made
in Russia") e lo lasciano quasi morto nella neve. Comunque, Karol e`
felice di essere a casa. Prende la sua valigia e va la` dove puo`
trovare suo fratello.
(questa scena del ritorno in Polonia e` quasi comica, come se il regista
si stesse facendo gioco del suo stesso paese). Karol sta ancora
sognando Dominique, ma deve anche trovare un lavoro, mentre aiuta suo
fratello nel suo salon. Assunto come guardia del corpo di un
capitalista senza scrupoli , egli rapidamente capisce il modo in cui
far soldi nel suo caotico paese: riesce a captare il piano del
capitalista di comprare una terra e la compra prima di lui.
Lo stesso uomo che l`ha aiutato in Parigi lo paga per ucciderlo: Karol
lo spara con una cartuccia a salve e l`uomo tranquillo lo paga. Quando
scopre il doppio gioco, il capitalista quasi lo uccide, ma Karol ha
scritto un testamento che assegnera` la terra alla chiesa quando sara`
morto, volonta` che nella cattolica Polonia e` come un`assicurazione
sulla vita. Il capitalista e` costretto a comprare la terra da lui per
un prezzo dieci volte superiore a quello pagato.
Presto, Karol diventa spietato e avido come il peggiore dei nuovi
capitalisti.
Ma Karol e` ancora ossessionato da Dominique. La chiama e lei mette
giu`. Karol ricorre a un piano per portarla in Polonia: riscrive il suo
testamento e lascia a lei ogni cosa, quindi finge di essere morto.
Dominique arriva in Polonia e piange al suo funerale. E lui l`aspetta a
letto. Dominique e` sorpresa ma fortemente scioccata. I due fanno
l`amore e lei prova l`orgasmo della sua vita. Adesso lo ama, ma lui
scompare. Karol ha pianificato la sua vendetta, facendo una soffiata
alla polizia sul fatto che la sua morte potrebbe non essere stata
naturale e che giusto una persona avrebbe un ovvio motivo: la polizia
arresta Dominique per l'omicidio di Karol, loro di certo non credono
che Karol sia vivo. Ora Dominique prova quello che ha sentito Karol:
innamorata, maltrattata,umiliata, rovinata.
Ora Dominique e` in carcere. Karol guarda verso di lei con un binocolo e
piange.
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