It's been a Krzysztof Kieslowski festival here the last few days. We've watched, two times each and with concentrated and astonished attention, Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs films: Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge. Individually (which is how we viewed them in 1993-94 when they first appeared) they're splendid; taken together, they're an even more wonderful achievement.
Kieslowski tells complicated stories with economy and precision; I don't know any filmmaker who can make every corner of the frame count for so much. It must be his training as a maker of documentaries that accounts for the rich, factual surface of his narrative. And yet his chosism -- his thing-ism -- is always in the service not of plot only but of the enigma as well. Kieslowski knows what accomplished novelists also know -- that an object, studied closely, becomes a metaphor. The three films share a common theme -- that it's impossible to find happiness outside of society -- but the presentations are so various and imaginative and the characters so rich that philosophical questionings are as unobtrusive as they are omnipresent.
Kieslowski swore off directing when he finished Rouge, but had apparently relented and had started on another trilogy (Heaven, Hell, Purgatory) when the heart attack killed him. But there's the earlier work; we'll track backwards to watch, once again, The Decalogue and The Double Life of Veronique.
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