Three Colors: Red Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum

SOURCE: "Seen and Unseen Encounters: Kieslowski's Red," in Chicago Reader, December 16, 1994, pp. 47-53.

In the following essay, Rosenbaum discusses the possibility of resurrection in Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy, especially Red.

A film of mystical correspondences, Red triumphantly concludes and summarizes Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy by contriving to tell us three stories about three separate characters all at once; yet it does this with such effortless musical grace that we may not even be aware of it at first. Two of the characters, both of them students, are neighbors in Geneva who never meet—a model named Valentine (Irene Jacob) and a law student named Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit)—and the third is a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who lives in a Geneva suburb and whom Valentine meets quite by chance, when she accidentally runs over his German shepherd.

Eventually we discover that Auguste and the retired judge are younger and...
(read more)